Bara Jam 2024 Post Mortem

What went wrong

Honestly, maybe I went a little too ambitious with this one again lol.

This game was essentially supposed to be a mix between Paper Mario TTYD and Honkai Star Rail mechanics. Honestly, I didn’t really get far with the overall gameplay mechanics since I was fighting Unity for 99% of it.

Whenever I worked on 1 mechanic I would get stuck, take a break, come back only to work on an entirely different mechanic. This usually happened cause there was like 100 different things I wanted to put into the game and I never planned for which order I would put them in.

Eventually that led me to abandon some mechanics until I remembered I needed to put them in. Thats why the main summoning system doesn’t even work all that well. You can summon but they don’t get turns yet nor can you evolve any of your units. I had to implement the inventory system, dialogue system, battle system, capture system and more in this to get it running.

There was also the fact that some mechanics required OTHER mechanics to exist before I could implement them unless I did a shortcut. For example, if I wanted to code the Summoning system, I’d have to create the Capturing system first. If I wanted to work on evolving the summons I would have to work on the inventory system AND the leveling system first.

This was also the first time I was using Scriptable Objects (SO) in Unity which was MUCH more annoying than I thought it would be. I always assumed SOs let me use them like a template so I could just modify the values right after. BUT NOPE, apparently modifying any value at runtime modifies the actual SOs file as well. I ran into multiple situations when testing where I would try to attack the enemy, then return to fight the same enemy type again but because the SOs template was modified they started with the wrong health value.

With every Bara Jam I typically had to give up doing Orctober stuff so this year I worked on a little bit of the game in August and then just did Orctober stuff on October and then worked on it the rest of November. Unfortunately, I got farther in August than in November because most of my job’s projects were on cooldown so I had a lot more free time.

In November, my job started getting busier and I lost most of my weekdays and didn’t have as much free time to work on the jam. Regardless, I’m still happy I got as far as I did. This is one of the busiest games I’ve made. Essentially combined multiple systems from past Unity projects into this one.

If I had more time I would get the summon system working and actually allow you to USE the summons and at least draw up CG scenes for the summons/enemies.

Inspiration

As mentioned before inspiration was basically just Super Paper Mario TTYD and Honkai Star Rail. I was not actually a big fan of turn based games as they are usually very basic. However, that was before I realized I just didn’t like how FF handled turned based combat.

All of FF’s combat is usually just click and attack majority of the time. Most of the strategy comes from just making sure you balance healing your team and attacking so you don’t die. Other turn based games have actually handled turn based combat systems in more fun ways that I actually liked. Whether its:

• Cris Tales’s Past and Future mechanic where you can send an enemy in to the past, poison them, then force them into the future to do burst poison damage
• Honkai Star rail/Dislyte letting you manipulate turn order and drain enemy AP to never let the enemy have a turn
• Shadow Hearts’s Judgement wheel system that rewards good timing
• TTYD where you have to pay attention not only to the enemies but to the stage and backgrounds too

I really have a lot of ideas I want to implement in this game in the future.

What happens next

I’m going to make a few more patches to this game. Just to fix somethings up and clean up some stuff. Afterwards, I’ll put it in the backlog as I go back to continue working on my older projects.