Survive the Sun Postmortem

Hi, everyone.

This is Lyn, and with my two other friends, Survive the Sun was our first attempt at a game jam together. While I've had some experience working on games and other projects, it was actually the first time the other two tried to make a real, published game.

With a two-week timeframe on top of us working full-time and other things, it was quite a juggle and learning experience for everyone involved.

This postmortem is going to go over our experience and what we learned.

About the Team

But before I go into it, let me just introduce the three of us first.

Lyn
Me! Back in college, I used to participate in some local game jams and now I actually work in the industry—but in a non-dev role. My experience is on the marketing and publishing side. :) Despite that, my desire to make hobby projects still burns (heh), and I usually tackle the overall design, writing, UI, and of course, presentation and other administrative work tied to our projects.

Thuong
Our programmer. When asked to leave a comment, Thuong said "Something about me goes here, probably."

Domo
Our artist. With only a traditional illustration background, this jam has been a big adjustment to create work that's ready to be used in games.

Phase 1 - Concept

Before we even heard about the game jam, I was already trying to pitch to my friends to try to make a game together "with our powers combined!"

The very first idea centered around a healer, but get this: one that was lazy and didn't want to move around healing party mates. So instead, they set up a "one-stop heal shop" (and that was my placeholder name that everyone thought too cheesy lol). The gameplay was akin to those cooking games where you serve customers dishes. We had some really early demos, and the first one ended up being sort of like a shooter because  they were shooting out their healing orb. The second one was a little closer to the original vision, but...it felt much slower paced..

Then I found out about the game jam. By the time we found out about the theme, I was like, "this is perfect!"

Given the two-week time limit, I made the call to go back to the shooter genre. But trying to pivot a really action-y game around healing instead of surviving was difficult, so I ultimately made the choice to drop that context and stick to what felt easier to convey.

The most popular games that matched what we wanted to make were Vampire Survivors and 10 Minutes 'til Dawn. Naturally, our new attempt had a similar premise of trying to survive the night. Here are some screens of what came from that...

What could have been...

Some early sketches of undead monsters

But man, I kept having this thought: "It's always at night and edgy." Wouldn't it have been cool if we pivoted the game to be in the day? Something like what the movie Midsommar was able to pull off. So then it became...Survive the Day! And then I changed "Day" to "Sun" to sound snappier, and really honed in on making the Sun the big bad.

A family member suggested to make things deceptively cute, since things were already flipped. Think Adventure Time and Happy Tree Friends. We always think of daytime and sun(shine) to be positive; good. So that influenced the art style to have this sticker/construction paper aesthetic the game ended up taking on.

Our concept was really solidified by this point, though we barely had a premise. Just that the sun was bad. And so we rolled with just that.

Phase 2 - Prototypes

Survive the Sun went through nine builds before we felt that it was ready enough to be shared publicly.

Placeholders galore

Let's just say each build came with realizing what we had way more than expected figure out, and constant play-testing of each one. In Builds 1 and 2, the game felt too boring. Then Builds 3 - 5 were way too difficult. Build 6 is where the player was way too strong now that we finally added in the special attack, and Build 7 was finally where things...okay. We think the game has much more potential, but Build 8 was reaching the final bar of, yeah, okay, this is just barely good enough so we can share it. Build 9 was just whatever we could throw in last minute (and not without unexpected errors, as usual).

It was also during this phase that we quickly learned of our limitations. For the most part, we didn't really have super extensive knowledge when it came to building a game in Unity, so our game was (and kind of still is) basically flat images sliding around .

We  didn't have an animator or a sound composer to fill in the gaps of what would have elevated the experience. And things like lighting effects, particle effects, and lots more animations are all things we would have loved to have and maybe revisit. But that's all part of the experience!

learning2animate.jpg

Phase 3 - The Finish Line

With the core of our game pretty set, we had...basically two days left to tie up any loose ends. One being that it wasn't until Build 8 that final sprites from Domo were ready to be used. So the visuals went from shapes to placeholder art to finally the intended sprites.

The Monster Lineup!

There also remained polishing up some other visuals, final tweaking of numbers, and sharing our build to a small handful of friends and family to test. We were pretty much skidding down to the final hours, but fortunately were able to make it in time!

Phase 4 - What's Next

As mentioned before, there were definitely a lot of thoughts of, "Oh yeah, we could totally add this, or do it this way!" on our minds. Much of the jam time was basically going back to the drawing board and revisiting balance. Of spawns, damage values, health values, speed—you name it. Then there remained a mountain of visual improvements (some we already have assets for but never added in) left on our backlog.

If you asked each me "Did this game match what you set out to make?" the answer would be, "No." Haha. I have a lot regrets, but also a lot of learnings. Ideas and hope for the future.

Whether that's reflected in more updates to Survive the Sun or in our next project remains to be seen. Nonetheless, I'm pretty proud of what we accomplished of what we did given the two-ish weeks we had. And I hope you enjoyed playing our little game and reading about our journey to make it. 🌞

- Lyn