Nascient Devlog #0 [Origins]

 Mann here, 

I’ll be taking a more anecdotal approach to this log. I imagine they won’t all be like this, the next feature-focused one might be all bullet points :P

Nascient began in Room 220 of Joe Brown Hall at UGA, where Nori_Nori had Japanese and I had my Senior Seminar in Comparative Lit the immediate next block. 

We already knew each other as team leads through Game Builder’s Club, but it was through these fleeting transition periods that we would expand on and carve out an interesting (rather spoilery) premise from our shared experiences. We’d draw out concepts on the whiteboard and draw stares from my classmates filing in. I think they thought it was cool, but honestly, no idea. We were kinda locked in.

Deciding early on it would be a long-term project, we made a plan for summer to work on a vertical slice and expand the team to include art and music.

We were really wondering how to reach out to artists, with me even considering posting totally legal flyers up over at the Art Building, when it occurred to me that Sophia, a fellow Creative Writing Club officer who’s happily doodling literally any time I see her, might know some people who are interested in game art. So I asked her if she did, and next thing you know, our artists  ophelia and Puinpumi are on board!

For music I just had a feeling that dub-bat, who did an amazing work for a game project the previous semester, would be available and up for it. A quick message and scoop and wow we have a music/sound guy. Nice.

Our prospective team assembled, we wanted to work together in a lower stakes context first. The Godot Wild Jam, a 9 day medium-sized game jam on the 9th of every month, provided the perfect opportunity. 

We joined Godot Wild Jam #81 in May. Theme: Expedition.

One of the optional wildcard challenges we immediately folded in was making the player an antagonist, which led us to a false start. We had another concept about wrangling adventuring parties through a dungeon as an items seller, but couldn’t quite get a good feel for the loop in our ideation phase. 

Instead, we pivoted to a more streamlined story-driven concept that played to our strengths (I could do more with the narrative and in a visual novel format we wouldn’t have to worry about animations and our artists could focus on their amazing line art). 

With seven (hour-wise closer to six) days remaining, we landed on a visual-novel style game where you play as a local nomad guiding a Chinese expedition in the Steppes of Mongolia who has plenty of reasons to not want them to succeed.

A team-wide sleepless night and hasty content additions/tweaks right up until 5 minutes from the deadline later… we’d done it. And I’ll let the result speak for itself!

Check out Trembling Steppe here: https://itch.io/jam/godot-wild-jam-81/rate/3569429

**For anyone playing, there’s a potentially game-ending bug midway where your Trust tanks. We recommend trying items while at camp to offset that :)**

Needless to say, we were ecstatic about our results, and more importantly we had an earned confidence that we could do something really cool with a bigger project as we transitioned to working on Nascient. 

More on that in the next entry!