Every year during October I like to make something short and fitting for the season. For the past few years, that’s been a Gothic tale set in a gloomy house (or cellar), following a young(ish) man of varying degrees of trustworthiness.

This year was something completely different.

Unquiet Grey is a timeloop horror*/romance about a troubled girl and a kindhearted aspiring musician she meets by chance. It’s set in the modern day (a setting I typically *don’t *like to write in) with matching prose – far from the slightly archaic and rather wordy approach I typically take.

* It’s not a scary game*. It’s the least frightening of any of my games, really, but it deals with heavy themes and I consider any game set in the real world to be horror because there is nothing more horrific to me than the daily process of living and residing in reality.*

I love game jams because they’re a short time where I can try new things, and I usually have a specific goal I want to explore or achieve. For Portrait of a Ghost that was incorporating camera movement and panning. For It Paints Me it was answering ‘how quickly can I possibly make a visual novel that still feels complete?’

All I set out to do with Unquiet Grey was make a game that used parallax, but I ended up learning a lot more (and biting off a bit more than I could chew...)

Unquiet Grey: Part One - Postmortem

As the full game isn’t out yet, this isn’t a true postmortem but more of a discussion on the jam and general process behind development.

I don’t remember the exact moment I came up with the idea for this game. I don’t remember a lot of things. I knew whatever I made would have to be short, so I tossed aside other ideas (like a branching narrative game where you’re a plague doctor, or a highly illustrative interactive poem) because I didn’t think they were bite-sized enough.

In theory, a timeloop game is great for a jam because the* loop *means you can repeat and reuse scenes, locations, etc.

Well, that’s assuming you keep the number of loops reasonable and don’t make everything completely different every loop...

Haha.

The strongest thing in my mind, however, was a specific scene. A scene where you’re alone, with nobody alive around you and no choice but to use a stranger’s phone to call for help. But an older version of you stares back from the screen, smiling beside the phone’s owner, and *your *birth date is the pass code, not his.

What the hell is going on?

Story & Writing

Unquiet Grey is told from the perspective of a cynical sixteen-year-old girl. It’s choppy. Curt. Abrasive. It carries the defeated anger of a vulnerable soul and it doesn’t hesitate to call you, the player, out when it wants to.

It’s unlike most of my other works; the closest stylistically would probably be The Last Winter Knight, a game that also has a cynical main character and is told through 2nd person perspective (though that game features a grown medieval knight, not a modern teenager). It was definitely refreshing to navigate the main character’s voice and write a story this way.

On the first day of the jam, besides making a rudimentary list of sound and art assets for scenes I was sure we’d need, I got down to work on writing the story. And again on the second day. And the third.

(me on day 2)

...By the time I finished the script was 11k words long.

For context, the longest game I’ve made in a jam this short was Portrait of a Ghost, which is 5k words. I think of myself as a fairly good judge of scope on a small scale (not so much on a large scale, but I’ve never had major scope issues on short jams before). Well.

This was clearly Way Too Much, but this was what the story asked for, demanded, commanded from me as it forced the words from my frozen fingertips. A few loops weren’t enough to convey the utter despair and deterioration of the protagonist’s psyche. The same things couldn’t happen in each loop either, because who would let the same things happen?

I am very, very fortunate that my team members were more than willing to give their time to bring the full story to life, even if it’d have to be at a later date (and are still at work on it!).

For the jam though, we cut it down to one loop.

Artwork

Before the jam, I started making moodboards for my team’s artist, Asrielle, to use as references for the characters’ appearances.

The lead characters’ designs are based on previous characters from The Last Winter Knight. I suppose you could think of this game as an AU, though a completely standalone one. There’s no link to Winter Knight besides this.

Asri was able to perfectly capture their characters and personalities even at the concept stage. I was absolutely delighted when I saw these sketches of them:

*Look at their soft boy + *“he asked for no pickles” energy.

Because we were using parallax effects, the artwork had to be set up a specific way, so I made guidelines for Asri to work with:

I ended up doing most of the finicky work of layer formatting myself since I was the one who had to put them in engine anyway.

*Side note: did you know that Asrielle is the creator of the webtoon Queen’s Trial? If you want to see more of her gorgeous artwork, check out her comic! *

Music and Sound

Jason was the sound wizard for this project – and that’s not me exaggerating! When I asked for some phone blips to use for the UI he made a whole suite of every noise that could possibly come from a phone. Spoopy night ambience? How about multiple ambient tracks for outdoors OR indoors for background layering? Wizard.

He also did all the music tracks, including composing and mixing an entire indie rock song plus variations to fit different scenes.

The music for this game, like the setting and style, took a different direction from my other projects. I wanted an indie rock inspired sound, and gave Jason a couple of references before starting, like these:

I ended up writing Corin to be a guitarist too, so having guitar in the soundtrack became extra meaningful.

UI and Programming

One of my favourite parts of how the game turned out is the UI! I think it lends the game a unique look and feel, while also being completely on theme.

For UI, I always start with a mock-up in photoshop so I’m not blindly moving things around in engine.

It was my first time incorporating images into the menu (and generally overhauling the default quick menu in ren’py) so I’m pretty satisfied with the result!

Ren’py already has a built in “hide UI” function (pressing the H key) but I wanted a dedicated button on the menu for it. This fit with the phone camera theme and gave players an easy way to look at Asri’s artwork, which I really wanted to show off.

Once the script was done, I handed it off to Allie Vera, our proofreader and editor.

Having an editor on the team was a blessing; when I make games by myself, I’m a being of complete Chaos. I’ll have multiple docs of separate story chunks and work on them in whatever order. I’ll do line edits right as I’m copy and pasting things in engine. I’ll decide right in the middle of development that actually I want to change to the Oxford style instead of whatever the hell I was doing previously.

Having another person forced me to reign in the chaos and saved me from releasing a game where I didn’t capitalise ‘German Shepherd’ properly lmao. I knew the story was in good hands thanks to Allie’s previous work on titles that I enjoy (like Alaris) and it helped make things so much smoother knowing I had less to wrangle with in the coding stage.

Coding

The thing that eats up the most time during scripting for me is usually sprites. Sprite movement and expression changes are my beloathed. Which is okay, because there aren’t any in Unquiet Grey. Yay!

Audio can also be quite time-consuming and that was definitely true here, but because scripting the actual text was much easier this time I was able to get at least a good chunk of the foley I wanted done in time for the jam.

*Fun tidbit: the game will recognise several common (or less than common) flower names if you input them instead of Rose. *

Wrapping up the Jam

Itch.io experienced some Technical Difficulties around the end of the jam, which was quite fun, but thankfully didn’t affect our submission.

What I did struggle with at the end (besides coding the sfx and adding the final art assets) was coming up with a title, since our working one was:

A fantastic title, but a tad too wordy.

(I’ll go more into how we picked Unquiet Grey when the full story is out, but if you know me and how often I use puns, you might already have a good idea.)

Post-Jam and Onwards

(Good golly spellcheck, I can tolerate you not believing ‘recognise’ is a real word, but ‘onwards’? Really?)

The game currently has a complete script, but its long list of art and audio assets have yet to be completed. Asri and Jason have both graciously decided to continue working on it even after the jam ended, which I’m so thankful for. I’m truly happy that they believe in this story and wants as much as I do to see it completed.

Given that my team is volunteering their free time to complete it, I don’t have a strict plan for when the final game will release. I want to give them the time they need (and a long break after the staggering amount of work we crammed into a week...) but I’ll update when I have news to share!

Sneak peek of what’s to come...

Scream Jam is a rated jam, and while I was hopeful we would score highly in aesthetics with Asri’s wonderful artwork and the effort I put into the graphics, I didn’t think we’d get high ratings overall. Visual novels are quite niche, the game didn’t get that many downloads and it definitely fell short of the horror and atmosphere I wanted initially.

I honestly forgot about it after a few days, completely missed when the rating period ended, and only found out when I got a message telling me congrats and wondered ‘huh, what for?’

...Oh.

Our game getting 2nd out of over 900 entries is utter insanity to me. I couldn’t be more thrilled, and I’m so so proud of what my team accomplished. (I’d still be even if we were ranked rock bottom, they are such lovely and talented folks!) I’m so happy others enjoyed playing it, even if it was incomplete.

I think to end off this already very long devlog, I’ll share my favourites out of the games I got to play from the jam:

Angelface is a pixel art visual novel that oozes style and dread.

I Can’t Sleep is a simple point and click horror with fantastic sound design and is utterly terrifying to play alone in the dark.

Leaftaker is a mystery that you’ll dig deeper and deeper into even if it feels like you’re uncovering things you don’t want to know.

Files

Get Unquiet Grey - Part One