🏆 How To Win A Game Jam
4 reasons why our game Reaplaced became a winner!
Happy Mystery Monday! In today's newsletter, you will learn:
How Reaplaced ranked in the Spooktober 2023 Game Jam
4 tips for making an award-winning mystery game
On Saturday, it was revealed that our game WON THIRD PLACE in addition to BEST ORIGINAL SOUNDTRACK in the 2023 Spooktober Game Jam!
Congratulations to our composers Solo and LockedOn, as well as ZetaKen, Nayru, RavEN, CyberSe7en, Plot;3unny, and Xolf!
I couldn’t be more proud of our team!
We faced some very strong competition from the other entries, and of course my congratulations go out to the 2nd place and 1st place winners as well!
Not only did we receive the favor of the judges, but the general population on itch also placed us within the top 10 for three different categories:
I am especially happy that we ranked within the top 10 for both the Halloween and Overall categories, and I’m happy to see RavEN’s work on the UI recognized too!
(Oh, and somehow we placed #120 in Voice Acting with nothing more than beeps!)
These are tremendous numbers all around, and we are incredibly thankful to everyone who played Reaplaced and supported us throughout these two months!
It’s a very strong start to our Mystery Gamedev community!
So I know what you’re wondering: what’s the secret to making a winning entry?!
During the awards ceremony, the judges revealed their thoughts on each winning game, so I thought I’d take some time to go over their points from my perspective.
Here are 4 tips for making a winning mystery game for a game jam!
1. Make a memorable detective
Your detective should have a unique design that stands out from the competition.
Grea Perrim is an incredibly unique detective, firstly in the sense that she's not merely a human, but a supernatural entity — a grim reaper!
Her motivation for crime-solving completely differs from human detectives, giving even the most seasoned mystery gamers a brand-new experience.
Grea’s isn’t wearing a typical school uniform or casual outfit, but a fantasy costume with a spooky palette that would be highly recognizable even from a distance.
Her scythe makes it immediately clear that she's a grim reaper, but the magnifying glass inside it lets you know she's a detective, too.
The scythe became such a symbol, we even included it on the logo, textbox, and icon!
2. Make solving your mystery fun
As the famous mystery author G. K. Chesterton once noted:
"The first and fundamental principle is that the aim of a mystery story, as of every other story and every other mystery, is not darkness but light."
In other words, if the solution is too confusing, or doesn't make sense, or feels unfair, then the whole thing was a waste of time.
Even if the player ultimately fails to solve the mystery, it's important for them to at least feel like they had a fighting chance.
Our inclusion of a CLUES screen helped players know where to focus their attention.
It also helped them review information relevant to the crime without needing to load back to a previous point in the story.
All information necessary to solve the mystery was available in a screen they could freely access during the entire game.
Enhancing the user experience will encourage players to actively participate in solving the mystery, and will ultimately leave them with a positive impression.
Think of it this way: solving a mystery is already a pretty hard thing for most people.
So what kind of features can you add to make solving your mystery more fun?
3. Make the player feel smart
There is no shortage of immersive simulation games designed to make the player feel like a truck driver, business tycoon, or sports star.
Mystery games are, by the same token, all about making the player feel like a detective.
The only way to truly simulate that feeling is to properly set up clues and teach the player how to make deductions from them.
Which, if you think about it, isn't even a simulation — when you make deductions from evidence, you truly are a detective.
But in a classic whodunnit like Reaplaced, you can't realistically expect everyone to solve the mystery before the detective reveals the answer.
Players go into the game with varying levels of intellect and experience, and despite your best efforts to nudge them in the right direction, they might still ultimately fail to solve the mystery.
So what can you do to make even the least experienced players feel smart, and especially when there isn't any gameplay to level up their deductive skills?
One easy way to make the player feel smart is to… well, make everyone else look stupid!
For example, we had the characters other than Grea be a little less intelligent than the average person, per Knox's 9th commandment:
'I may have been a fool,' he says to himself as he puts the book down, 'but at least I wasn't such a doddering fool as poor old Watson.'
One important clue — that pretty much anyone playing the game will immediately notice — literally flew over all the characters' heads.
At the climax, Grea explains this clue to the characters, who were dumbfounded.
Even if the player got nothing else correct, they almost certainly got that right.
It's a small but satisfying victory.
There were also various points in the story where characters asked Grea to explain certain concepts, such as a “locked-room murder”, and so anyone already familiar with those terms would feel smart just for knowing about them.
I’d like to stress that my point isn’t to “dumb down” the mystery in any way — it’s always better for your game to teach players how to “level up” their thinking.
“Feeling smart” is just a matter of confidence, and asking someone even the most basic question — that they end up answering correctly — is a surefire way to help them build confidence in themselves.
In short, you don't need to make the player feel smarter than the detective — just smarter than the perception they had of themselves at the beginning of the game.
4. Make the most of every element
Everything must come together to create a coherent experience for the player.
The writing, the art, the sound, the user interface, the characters, the cinematography — it should all come together to create a whole that is larger than the sum of its parts.
No matter how good any one component might be in isolation, it's the combination of them all that the player ends up experiencing.
And especially in a competitive game jam, there's absolutely no room for inconsistency.
My role as Project Manager was all about making sure that everything meshed together well.
The best way to make that happen is to clearly define a shared vision from the very start, and stick to it all the way through.
After setting our scope, we wrote an outline and immediately checked for any problems.
Having resolved all design issues at the start, it was just a matter of doing the work and creating the content as we had planned.
I maintained a mostly hands-off approach, allowing each member to let their creativity shine through.
When it came time to put each piece together, everything naturally fit into place.
And we also gave ourselves the whole final week to run through the game and eliminate any inconsistencies that had popped up at the last minute.
And that’s it!
Now after reading all that, you won’t have any trouble making a winning entry, right?
…Just kidding!
You’ll still need lots of practice and a bit of luck, but don’t feel discouraged.
I truly believe that if you continue to work hard, work smart, and believe in yourself, you can achieve great things.
And besides — simply finishing a game is a victory in itself.
Even if we didn’t win a prize, I would’ve absolutely considered Reaplaced a victory.
Working alongside such great people and creating lifelong memories is the real prize!
Thank you for reading!
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