The Baked Body

In the idyllic seashore town of Nook Harbour, Detective Toe Beans solves mysteries and helps the townspeople out whenever he can. Today is the town's 148th annual pie baking contest. The competition is always fierce but Granny Smith usually comes out on top. She has won the competition for 30 years running. This year however, just before the competition, Granny Smith is found dead, baked inside a pie! Inspector LeRibbit, a slick, big city inspector just so happens to be in town right when the crime of the century occurs. Detective Toe Beans and Inspector LeRibbit reluctantly work together to unravel the dark and demonic mystery lying underneath the cozy town of Nook Harbour.

What is it

This year for TOJam (20th anniversary!), I teamed up with 5 other people to make a The Baked Body, a visual novel murder mystery. I usually jam solo, or with one other person, so this was a departure for me - and I knew that going in, which helped. TOJam is a yearly Game jam in Toronto run by wonderful folks, and its always a blast.

Who is it

Our team was incredible:

• Ricky came on board early to help hash out the idea and provide any narrative work needed during the jam. I've wanted to jam with Ricky ever since Thought Policy, but a whole pandemic happened in there somewhere and it just hadn't happened. Ricky did a lot of the up front narrative planning and ended up being the go-to for any narrative reference the rest of us needed.
• Landen was on board early as well. Landen's working a job and in school, so I wasn't sure he'd be able to commit, but he was excited and made it happen, which is wonderful. Landen did some crucial programming for the case Scene, and acted as the bridge between the narrative team and the game engine, implementing the entirey of the games 48 narrative segments.
  
• Wilfred also signed on, which we were very excited about. Wilfred did the music for Fishin' Mission, the initial Ghost Ducks game. At the arcade that year, they put our game up on the projectors and piped the sound through the atrium's audio system, and everyone's head was boppin'. Wilfred composed all the music for the game, and was also game for making the voice warbling sfx featured when the characters speak.
• I kept an eye on TOJam's "Team building" discord and jumped on JJs post as soon as I saw it. JJ did 100% of the art for the project, and hit it out of the park. JJ conceptualized and completed final pieces for 5 BGs, 11 characters and 42 items. an absolutely insane amount of art assets! This doesn't even account for revisions, or incidental elements like the yarn & credit portaits. Truly herculean.
• Ricky realized early on he'd need a hand with all the narrative and pulled in Malcolm. Malcolm showed up, received a tour of what we had after the first day (not much) and then sat down and wrote the game. That's not an exaggeration - Malcolm wrote everything. That's 47 unique scenes. All of which supported by Ricky's narrative plan and conforming to the UX constraints of the game. Also, if you haven't played the game yet, its funny.
• Finally, I was there. I usually program & art & design my jam games in collaboration with 1 other person, so this was wildly unique - but fun! I ended up writing the framework for the game on Friday, and then shifted to more of a technical producer for the final 2 days: supporting other team members as they figured out pipelines,consulting with Landen as needed. Basically, I hovered around annoyingly and kept telling Ricky not to make the game bigger.

In all, the jam was a huge success: likely my all time favourite end result for a jam. The game looks great, and it demoed great at the arcade. We are all still somehow excited about updating it to bring it more in line with our vision.

Too big

The most prominent complaint after the first few days of release was that people couldn't save. Being asked to implement saving for a jam game so people could play it across multiple sessions is an entirely novel thing for me - luckily my architecture means all we need to save is a big list of what the player knows. The game supports saving now.

QA Support

One of the first players at the open house played the game for thirty minutes, and then hit a game breaking bug - brutal. when I heard about it, I cracked out the laptop with Landen, tracked it down and resolved it, pushing up a new build. After watching another player play for 15 minutes before backing out with "its tough to play in this environment" (I agree!), the first player came back and picked it up to try and get further. they played until finding another game breaking bug about 45 minutes into the game. I told them I would credit them as QA but they never left their name!

Design Thoughts: Uncovering vs Experiencing

I think some magic happened at the planning level for this jam, where Ricky and I came together with very different ideas, but both compromised to each other's vision as we worked out what to make. The UX constraints I laid down were meant to facilitate an entirely different genre of game, but anchored us all to a simpler set of systems, freeing up Landen & I to act more as Technical Producers than programmers, and allowed the team to make something that scaled further than it could have otherwise.

Uncovering

there is a flavour of game that involves the player slowly uncovering some information, and the player must do "thinky" things & leverage cognitive power to figure out how to learn more. You may have heard them called timeline games, or mystery games, or inference games. You might recognize a few gems: Type Help, Return of the Obra Dinn, The Roottrees Are Dead.

Experiencing

A more common flavour of game is one where you control some entity as you experience a story. in many of these games, the story does not move forward unless you solve some puzzle and move it forward yourself. for the sake of narrowing the frame of reference, this game might be something like Return to Monkey Island, The Legend of Zelda, Assassin's Creed.

When making TBB, my mindset was that we could build out a rough prototype of an "Uncovering the Truth" type game, and as we narrowed down the ideas to work on I never really left that mental mode. I don't think the rest of the team was operating on that wavelength, and by the time I realized there was some conceptual drift we were knee deep in the game we would end up making.

No Game Designer

Ultimately, we had no game designer. Ricky and I were trying to figure out what we were making ahead of time, and we moved through lots of mechanically rich ideas before settling on the one we started building off. The player must connect 3 clues to trigger a narrative segment, and each narrative segment provides implicit clues via storytelling, as well as explicit clues that appear in your operable set of clues. This meant each narrative segment would be "unlocked" by 3 clues, and if you started from some set of seeded clues you would be able to unlock all the narratives by making all the requisite connection. I thought you would be an external force, looking into a narrative that you had to uncover. Ultimately what got written was a game that you experience by making these connections.

This is still a great game, and the writing, art & music make it very fun (and funny!). There are some UX issues that arise form this drift though. The most prominent is that the player themselves have to be able to connect themselves to clues, because the connection represents what the main character should do next, rather than some connection to the events that have already happened. Directing the player character to go to the forest to talk to some NPC is not showing you've successfully figured something out, its telling the player character to do something in hopes that they will figure something out.

Breadcrumbs

For this reason, I realized we would need a hint system - there's no way for the player to know what has to happen next if the player's actions push the plot forward. many of the "A-Ha!" moments are revealed narratively to the player's character, rather than inferred and solved out by the player.

Ultimately, the Hint system make the game very easy. this was preferred to the alternative, where players may have to blindly guess at some huge potential amount of combinations to progress (and realistically, just bailing). I think there's a future where we eke out the hints a bit differently to make the game's suggestions less obvious.

Accidental Scope Management

In retrospect, I probably should have entered the jam as a game designer rather than a technical producer if I wanted to make my initial idea. However, the approach we took still made an interesting game! If this game were developed in a purely narrative-first structure, the case scene would have likely been a map. we'd have needed an inventory system for clues. we'd have needed to write dialogue stems for each character's unique needs at unique points in the story, and possibly schedule where they appear at certain points. The content needed by these (mostly unneeded) mechanical branches would have sunk a game of this length with our team.

By locking a simple UX down early, we probably avoided building way more systems than we needed to get our core point across - even if we weren't all aligned on the core point itself.

You can play The Baked Body on Itch here.