GDJam Fall2024: A Long Paddle
Hello again! It’s definitely been longer than I would’ve liked since my previous blog post and since progress on my solo development project.
I was making great headway until June 21st, when Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree released. Development naturally paused as I soaked in all I could in the Land of Shadow. After a few weeks of playing it through and through again, I did a bit more work on the game before the day job picked up hard in the back to school season, picked up my exercise with regular runs, two destination weddings in August, and crucially, my band separator began recording our second EP, which I was the recording engineer, producer, mixing engineer, and mastering engineer for. That took a long time, now with its release less than 30 hours from the time of writing this, I can say I’m very proud of the work I did and am ready to get back to game development. Timed perfectly to match this release was the Ontario Tech Game Development Student’s Association’s annual fall game jam, which I partook in with two fellow alumni; one that had worked with my team on Zero Possession, and another I had only worked with in previous jams, but was on our “rival” team (mutually very supportive). I was stoked to get to work, even hours after uploading the masters of the EP for distribution and that being after 3-4 months of working on those songs for dozens of hours per week. I really missed game development and working with my friends to create something special, something which I think we did.
With the theme “not quite right”, we created A Long Paddle, in some ways an homage to the Getting Over It With Bennett Foddys of the world and in others a fun little romp in a pretty fall setting, that also involves dragging a canoe up a mountain.
We had a great time putting this together, and personally getting to work on a super small game jam project as an appetizer of sorts for the last stretch of my Mechdivers project was a wonderful thing to do. Nothing was overly difficult or challenging to accomplish, we all knew what we had to do, and we were able to let our creativity do its thing in a safe project, with the best part being that it turned out great! In fact I’m happy enough with where I was going with the music track that I’m thinking about turning into a proper song for my long-awaited hopefully-releasing-next-fall next album. Working with those two has been on my mind for a while, with my mind being set on us making a great and well rounded team with their incredible art and programming skills respectively, and I’m glad we were able to all collaborate here, and I’m hopeful it won’t be long before we see ourselves working together again.
My tendency to start projects really isn’t lost on me, and I’ve planned out the next 6ish months to aim for scoping down and completing some of the work I’ve set out for myself, both to continue to strengthen my portfolio and to keep busy in the lulls between hiring seasons. Having something short and sweet really was a fantastic foundational block for the next few months of creative work, so I’m very happy with what this project represents. I might be trying to climb a mountain in a canoe with a paddle, but if I’m persistent then it’ll happen.
As for the next dev log, I had actually drafted most of it right at the end of July thankfully, because I had done a lot of work leading up to the Elden Ring DLC, so that should be posted in the coming weeks when I’m really back into the swing of things there. A little tease is that I’ve come up with a lot of info about the setting that should make things like mission and level design easier to contextualize, and that my plans for scope have been altered in accordance with me looking to finish more.
Until next time!
