Now that the Game Writing SIG Arcjam is over, here’s a summary of my “devlog” notes: for me, true resilience was publishing this game, despite how much I hated it in the end. For you, it might be getting to the end of that game (try it, you’ll see for yourself).

That’s it. Thanks for attending my TED talk. 🎤

Just kidding! Keep reading if you’re curious about the backstage of how I came up with that silly game.

How it started…

A bit of context: I work in the game industry, but I’m not a dev. Not. At. All. But this year, I decided to step out of my comfort zone and try making games. And what a better way to do that than to attend game jams? By the time of this game jam, it would have been my third game jam over the span of 2 weeks, but my first flying entirely solo. (I may have a tendency to go all-in sometimes… 😅)

I chose to fly solo because I wanted to see what I could do now that I had two game jams under my belt. At the time, I was also dealing with some personal issues, so I didn’t want to be a no-show and let my team down. If that were to happen, the only person impacted would have been me. No big deal.

What I found particularly interesting about this jam was the chance, or additional challenge, to use a particular tool: Arcweave. We were given a couple of weeks to get familiar with it, try the tutorials and play around, and later get a time-limited access to an upgraded version of Arcweave to fully use it for the jam.

If you are familiar with tools like Twine or Moiki, then Arcweave will sound familiar to you. As I played around with the previous two before, figuring out how things work was waaay easier for me than navigating around Godot for a previous project (unreleased *yet*, but 90% is done and functional).

Here comes trouble

When time came for the theme to be revealed, I felt OK-ish. No need to learn a new tool while trying to make a functional game, which was the bare minimum I was aiming for. The “enjoyable” part was a nice bonus.

That was before knowing the theme: resilience.

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Don’t get me wrong, it’s a great theme and tons of ideas popped into my head right away. A ton, yes, but nothing solid enough to make an entire story around it, no matter how small. Sad, heartbreaking, tear-inducing stories were out of the question too. I was already in a bad place, I didn’t want to go into those dark corners and turn it into a game.

The first hours were spent brainstorming various ideas, playing around with game mechanics and hoping it will somehow help.

Not really.

24 hours later, still nothing. Not a single idea that I liked. Not a single story that was even remotely tied to the theme, let alone enjoyable.

Darkness my old friend… 🫠

Moving forward anyway

Near the end of the second day, as I was browsing through my “cemetery” of story and game ideas, I stumbled upon a file that was nearly seven years old. We were on November 23, 2025, and the file had been created on November 25, 2018.

In this file, the story takes place in a universe of mythological creatures and other fairy folks that I’ve been toying around with for that long and was actually planning to turn into a game recently.

The coincidence was too funny to ignore, and since I had nothing until then for the jam, why not pick an idea from that potential game?

From the dungeon-crawling-with-a-twist game in a fairy-inspired world, I only kept one idea and sadly gave up on the dungeon-crawling part, because I thought I wouldn’t have enough time to do something good enough (in retrospect, maybe I should have kept that).

The idea was “premature/rapid aging inflicted by a spell” and how you would face it. And that’s how you end up in a world where you follow a know-it-all talking wisp and set on a short quest/hike to ask a hangover fairy to lift a curse that they accidentally hit you with.

It’s barely connected to the theme, in the way it evolved later, and a bit silly, but I couldn’t come up with anything better.

In about 3 or 4 hours after coming up with the idea and the characters, I had:

• drafted the whole story on paper;
• typed the 3000+ words with all the branches in a document;
• set everything up in Arcweave (boards, elements, connections, labels, etc.).

All that was left to do was polishing the story, tweaking the gameplay elements and doing the QA. At this point, it felt like a significant accomplishment. 🔥

Don’t leave anything for later

The last day of the jam started with a higher level of confidence, for a change. I had a story. Not incredible, not exceptional, but I had a full story with a beginning, a middle and an ending. That was far more than what I achieved with all my project ideas lying dormant in my cemetery folder or in my Notion page.

QA, aka the Magnify Glass of Flaws

Here came the time for QA! Fixing all the little bugs, tidying the interface so it’s clear where to click, etc. It took a lot of time, especially when you decide to change something at the last minute and you have to make sure you don’t forget anything or add more bugs.

Doing QA for others is an interesting experience, but doing QA for your own project is… humbling?

There’s no escaping aaaall the flaws that jump at your face, that’s for sure. I saw every wrong turn I took with the story or the game mechanics. At this point, I disliked it so much that I was seriously considering not publishing it and just giving up. After all, nobody but me would be disappointed, since I kinda kept to myself and barely engaged with anyone during the jam and on the Discord server. It would have gone totally unnoticed.

Or I could go back to that dungeon-crawling idea… but there wasn’t enough time to start again and still meet the deadline. So that option was nipped in the bud before it got too tempting to try it anyway.

The loops of Hell

The middle and ending part of the game, at the fairy’s house, each has a series of choices that loop back if you make the wrong choices.

One mistake I made here, out of laziness, was to make those manually instead of using code, like if/else.

Behold the mighty branches creating the loops of Hell:

Screenshot of all the different branches corresponding to all possible choices in that sequence for picking 3 colored bottles

Screenshot of all the different branches corresponding to all possible choices in that sequence for retelling the correct key elements of how the character ended up cursed

Needless to say, that QAing that part was a real pain. I didn’t properly label each link, for a start. Then I remembered that my past self had left my future self the tasks of checking all the duplicated branches that cover all the options and adding the proper jumpers at the end of each series of choices.

Fun… 💀

At least, I didn’t forget to color-code said choices in green or red to help me figure things out…

When converting my doc file into an Arcweave board, I was “into the flow” and didn’t want to stop and rewatch tutorials on how to use if/else and other useful bits of code in Arcweave to make my life easier. “I’ll fix that later”. Grave mistake, my friend. Grave mistake.

QAing all that took me most of the remaining time. One thing I did well, in my own opinion, was that I limited the choices for each level.

Take the bottles, for example (screenshot 1): you only have three options each time, which limits the possibilities to a “reasonable” number. The first time, you can only pick between red, green and purple. The second time, you can only pick between orange, blue and pink. And for the third time, only black, white or yellow are available choices. Having more options would have been a nightmare for everyone.

By the way, the correct sequence is “purple”, “orange” and “black”.

Yes, flowers are a clue. Yes, I could have made it more obvious, maybe using bold formatting or even colors (didn’t find an easy solution so I gave up due to lack of time). Yes, that wisp is totally misguiding you! I like unreliable characters. Yes, I probably should have given you more hints about it. Though, there are other hints about the wisp and its “existence”.

Once you get through that first “loop”, you head right into the second one! Out of the frying pan and straight into the fire.

That’s the last part of the story, where the fairy asks you again to retell the events of that fateful evening. And if you haven’t paid attention to those elements that were not hinted at all, you’re stuck in a second loop of hell until you figure out the correct sequence (“The Brazen Dwarf”, “You ended up fighting”, “A chandelier”).

Remember when I told you, at the beginning of this devlog, that getting to the end of that game would be resilience for you. There it is.

How it ended…

And there’s no third loop. The game finally ends with a conclusion that loosely ties things up with the main theme.

On the final day of the game jam, I had a full story and a functional game. I gave up on making any visual or audio assets. It was a decision from early on. Since I came up with the idea super late, the goal was to focus on doing something “complete” and playable. Let’s say you can play while listening to your own music. Just like you would with a book, in a way.

But the fun never stops!

Guess who realized, 30 minutes before the deadline, that they only now “in theory” how to submit their game for the jam but have no idea about how to actually do it… 💀

I laughed nervously at the fact that, now that I had finally accepted the idea of releasing this game despite disliking it, that I couldn’t figure out how to submit it. What a joke! 🤡

To this day, I still don’t like that game and I can’t overlook its flaws.

Is it any good? Nope.

Do you feel the connection with the theme? Not so much.

Are there nice mechanics? There are “game mechanics”, period.

This whole devlog sounds rather glum, and it probably gives you a taste of what kind of game I would have made if I went all-in with my first ideas around resilience. Yet, I’m still proud of myself for not taking the “easy way out” by giving up.

That game jam was a great experience, and it didn’t discourage me enough to stop doing jams. In fact, I joined my fourth game jam (and second solo jam) almost right after this one.

And I’m planning to join even more! (Well, I have already joined 3 jams with deadlines in February, April and August 2026…) And with teams, from time to time, because it’s nice to be doing it with others too. Even if, during my first jams with teams, I felt rather useless because I know nothing about programming, art or audio.

The goal here anyway is to learn and I’m looking forward to trying other game engines. I have a looong list, complete with tutorials, and ideas. Feel free to stick around if you want to see the results of this new endeavor! 👀

Files