Game finished

I've finally finished. Submissions are due in about 3 hours.

It Is An Innkeeper was fun to make. I learnt Ink, which is very nice to use for a writer like myself. (And not so nice for a programmer like myself when tracking state; this is why things like items descriptions are so transient, and no one talks about their adventures much. I would have liked to be able to track entity relationships easily. But as a writer, it's great to use.)

I got a little bit of feedback from a friend of mine, and added a proper ending, as well as a little more guidance (a bunch of hints you can access before opening the bar each day, plus some spooky events that let you know you're on the right track ). To be honest, the buying and selling part of the game is a little neglected, but the adventuring works.

I'll run through my process and how the 48 hour Jam went for me.

Engine Choice
When I first read the GMTK Game Jam 2023 theme, I had a few ideas in a row, and this one seemed to be the smallest scoped, because it was only text (though I added some great royalty-free atmospheric music to it recently). I didn't know how to use Ink, but I had seen some GDC talks about it from Inkle, and to be honest it's not that complicated. I didn't expect to encounter too much faff trying to export my game — this was a big concern for me because I didn't want to be rushing to bugfix at the very end.

I considered a number of engines. Bitsy and Ink I had never used but seemed simple. Bevy, Ren'Py and WASM-4 I had some experience with, but that experience led me to think I'd be spending too much time troubleshooting. Bitsy would probably have also been fine, but . So I chose this idea, about talking to adventurers, based on the engine being Ink.

Scoping
I scoped and planned this game pretty well, all things considered. It was a small idea, which helped me when I had set-backs to stick to the deadline of 48 hours. I could narrow in on the core idea, of being a creepy innkeeper sending adventurers to their doom. One setback was that I hadn't realised Ink didn't allow for complicated entity relationships (without ugly code I later found on Inkle's patreon) and another came from naming my file "ink.ink" and having the web export overwrite itself. But I resolved those.

I think in retrospect I should have spent a little more time hammering out a plan for gameplay at the start. I had a rough idea, and a "player story" that was the types of interactions the player would have with the NPCs. But a few times I had to pause to rethink how I was going to make the game fun.

I think it is fun now, as long as you don't spend too much time buying or selling, both of which were core parts of my original idea when I first incepted it. Oops!

Writing
I'm not entirely sure why I chose to make the player character an "it", but I stuck with it because it alienates the player, makes them feel inanimate, vacant. It was one of my first writing decisions of the project. I hope the innkeeper feels like an inanimate NPC to people playing the game, because that's who it's meant to represent. Once I had the idea of an empty, strange protagonist, the atmosphere started to come together. The innkeeper would almost robotically send adventurers ("they" is a more human way to describe the adventurers, because they're meant to be the real characters — they have names) to their deaths (although that reminds me, I forgot to make death interesting in the gameplay, by adding a graveyard). The story developed from there, as I tried to create a tension between a human, loving side, and an hollowness. Some of this came through in my sentence structures, I hope.

Overall
I'm so so glad I participated in this jam, even if just because I now have a proper, playable game I'm proud of (and it only took 48 hours!). Ink was as easy as I hoped, except for storing data — although if I do this again I'll bite the bullet and begin with the hacky database code Inkle published. I didn't feel too pressured because I planned my idea in advance, and scoped my game according to the 48 hour deadline. All the same I did feel I wasted some time. I expect I'll participate in more games in future, although I'm not sure it'll be any time soon.