I spent a week making a game for the All the Mods Game Jam, which is now available here. This blog post is about the process I went through and what I don't like about the game.
You may be thinking, "But derpygamer2142, the jam was 14 days! How can you be so foolish so as to claim it was only a week?" The answer is that I joined with 9 days left after finding out that my friend contributed to the prize pool, because I'm not passing up an opportunity to steal his hard-earned money. Of course, after joining I waited a couple of days to start working on the game while I thought about what I wanted to do.
I've been planning a game for quite a while that I'm calling "Platformer Shooter Thing" (most likely the final title, not a placeholder). It has a somewhat similar premise where it focuses on immortality, and I wanted to explore the ideas without needing to go too far into development. While Lazarus Complex focused on someone with a life before they become immortal and how it affects them, Platformer Shooter Thing most likely won't do that. All this is to say, I'm not done with this idea and at some point I may make another game with a similar premise.
I based Lazarus Complex's style on a wonderful game called Not For Broadcast (I really recommend you play it), where you have periods of gameplay and then "cutscenes" of a sort where you can make decisions (I didn't really get a chance to add actual decisions). Before I started writing I counted out how many scenes I had to work with. The number I ended up with was 7. This was a bit disappointing to me, because I had more that I wanted to fit and I didn't feel like 7 would be enough.
You may be slightly hesitantly thinking, similar to before, "Derpygamer2142, you are terrible at counting! Not only are there 8 cutscenes, but there's one missing that you could have used!" This time, you would be correct. I don't know how I came to 7, but I got that number at least 4 different times, only realizing my mistake with 2 days to go. There wouldn't have been enough time to write two entirely new scenes and make 2 more drawings, so I opted to just clarify things a bit near the end and use the background image.
One of the last things I didn't like about this project is the final animation. The animation itself was great; I asked my friend, truckjumperdude to do that and he did a great job. I just didn't think about how long it should be and how many shots the storyboard should have, leading to the very short ending. I really like how Llamas with Hats (also a wonderful work that I highly recommend you watch) did this in the finale. It lets you see the world, gives you one of the few looks into who Carl really is, and then it abruptly ends. I might have been able to make up for my poor storyboarding if I had time to draw a bunch of death scenes and cut between them during the animation, but I didn't really have time for that.
This is where the thumbnail is from.
Finally, there's the jump indicator. It's a stupid white line and it looks bad. There was a cool and fancy thing that showed your trajectory, but due to an unfixed bug with an extension that I reported near the end of 2025, I had to get rid of it. This bug will crash your project, and sometimes will corrupt your save. Nothing that can be done there, but it's annoying.
As of writing this I don't know who won the jam (I'm guessing it will be Team Stacked), but it probably won't be Lazarus Complex. I'll update this post if we do.
This isn't related to the game or the jam, but while I was working on it this website kept going down. I'm like 90% sure that a bot was messing with me. It was going down at the same time every day, and when I made a cron job to restart it they started bringing it down immediately after the cron job ran! I'm working on fixing that problem now.