Recently I completed in my first game jam, where people complete games within a strict time limit to a certain theme. inkJam is one such jam for games writing in the ink language, this year the theme was "Let That Sink In".
I chose to take that very literally. You can play my game right now in your browser:
or Play That Sink on itch.io (exactly the same game)
You can see the official results and play all the other games on the inkjam results page.The competition is over. That Sink came fifth equal out of a field of twenty, which I consider a great result. The top two games in particular are very polished.
Overall I am very happy with the way That Sink came together. All up, it took me about 15-18 hours to complete over about 5 days, including the art work.
My method for things like this is to write the first couple of paragraphs to set the tone, then start doodling. These are the only notes I made during development. I didn't even have any puzzles mapped out. Once I had the general plot in place (as expositioned by the toaster) could I decide what obstacles might lie in the player's path.
The idea that the narrator could be sarcastic and even somewhat hostile to the player came early. I realized that the events I was describing were so ridiculous that they needed an over-the-top point of view. My last game, Voyage of the Marigold, doesn't really have a separate narrative voice at all so this was a nice change and very easy to write. I just had to pour my natural scorn onto the page.
I knew I wanted some art. I ended up doing it myself on a 8 year old iPad with an Apple pencil and the excellent procreate app. It is always hard to know when to stop when doing art so I set myself a strict time-limit of 25 minutes per image. The slightly unfinished style works well with the story.
After the art was finished I had to go back to change the text to match. For example, Toby was originally a big shaggy dog (appropriately enough given the nature of the story) but the dog I drew was nowhere near big or shaggy enough. It is easier to change text than redraw a picture so Toby got a haircut.
I had originally put aside some time to customize the default ink html page that the compiler spits out but once the content was finished I decided not to bother. The one small change I did make was to make the engine echo your choices in bold text to distinguish them from the rest of the narration, since the narrator is a distinct character in this game.
I am very proud of That Sink. My one regret is that I misspelled eldritch right in the first line of the text.