I failed Scream Jam 2024 | Negative

A recipe for disaster

After placing decently well in Scream Jam 2023, I was excited to push myself further in Scream Jam 2024. Since the last jam, I had been practicing my pixel art in daily challenges (1 2 3 4 5 6) and pushing myself to learn synthesizers. Going into the jam, I felt like I could do something more advanced than my 2023 entry and so I set myself two goals:

• Make a game that features more action
• Make all of the assets myself

But it wasn’t those goals which sunk me in the end though.

But why now?

I debated writing this post-mortem back in 2024 but I kept thinking I would eventually revisit the game so I didn’t want it spoiled. Half a year later, I’m ready to let this albatross go and talk about just where I went wrong.

The idea that never was

Story

Once the jam started, I initially decided on a game about a group of friends visiting a remote cabin in the dead of winter. As your character prepared to take a photo of the group with your instant film camera, invisible specters would cut power to the cabin and maim your friends. An errant shot from your camera would kill one specter and give you a way of defending yourself. As the cold set in, the player would discover they were locked inside by the specters and needing to quickly dispatch them before you froze.

Gameplay

As the specters would be invisible and require an exact shot from the camera to banish them, the gameplay would have centered around the player needing to find items around the cabin to help them reveal the specter’s positions. For example, I imagined breaking glass over a floor to reveal footprints where the specters were patrolling or overflowing a tub and watching for splashes on the floor. The player would have limited film so missed shots would not be an option if they wanted to survive.

The game would have been called Negative to reflect both the temperature the player was enduring as well as the film negatives integral to the gameplay.

Pivot

I really liked this idea and immediately set to work on a camera HUD and inventory system but quickly realized a glaring issue: art. While I had been practicing pixel art, I realized that I would need a lot of art to make an entire cabin not to mention all the items the player needed, animations, etc. I decided this was reason enough to pivot early and find a design that would be less taxing.

At that point, I feel like I was making the right decisions; however, it was my new idea that led to my demise.

The idea that shouldn’t have been

Story

My new idea was was still set in the remote cabin with invisible characters leaving footprints and a camera mechanic but with the twist that the player was really the monster and the footprints were being left by the cabin’s inhabitants. The whole idea being that the pale creature you play as feeds off humans by taking photos of them using a instant camera embedded in its head. To make it even more gruesome, the creature would hack up a polaroid of its victim’s last moments from its distended mouth after it’s finished digesting their consciousness.

Gameplay

Unlike the original idea, the humans would actively attack the player on sight so the gameplay would have pivoted to more of a stealth game with the creature needing to find ways to lure the humans around for better vantage points. The humans would have only been visible by their footprints to make the twist reveal less obvious at the end.

I really liked this new idea and became too attached to let it go despite it solving none of my existing issues while also creating new ones.

Art dilemma

Firstly, this new idea did nothing to address the art problem since I’d still needed a whole cabin’s worth of assets and things to draw the humans’ attention but now I also needed art for the monster twist reveal at the end.

Plot holes

Second, this new idea had tons of plot holes I couldn’t find a way to patch at the time:

• Why were the humans invisible if the creature literally has a camera for a head?
• Why don’t the humans just leave?
• How do I hide the fact that you’re a monster if you’re actively hunting things?
• And the list goes on…

Cursed game design problems

Finally, there’s a notion in game design of cursed problems: what happens when games which try to incorporate two or more mechanics that directly conflict. In my case, shifting the game to be more stealth focused fundamentally conflicted with the concept of needing to find your targets.

If the targets are invisible, how is the player supposed to avoid getting seen and attacked by them? Any visual queues for the targets would also give away their position making the trap laying mechanic useless. Similarly, if something is actively attacking you, you know where they are and can instantly photograph them.

I spent the entire rest of the jam trying to wrestle out a solution for this conundrum. I was convinced that similar games like Fatal Frame managed to make this work so I should be able to as well; however, having not actually played Fatal Frame at the time, I didn’t realize those games had wildly different mechanics from what I was trying to make despite the similar theming.

In hindsight, I can think of tons of ways to fix this both with story and gameplay but I was panicked at the time and hitting a mental block.

End of line

After several days had passed, I realized there was no way I could finish a game with the level of polish I wanted and just submitted my camera HUD proof-of-concept to the jam in defeat. A few kind folks left reviews saying they did like the concept and camera HUD but realistically, there was no game to be played.

Turning a negative into a positive

See what I did there? Sorry, anyways…

I’ve spent a good deal of time thinking about where I could have saved this jam and I believe I finally have a decent idea. I don’t think the failure was the story or even my cursed design problems. I suspect both of those were side effects of a mistake I made much earlier on.

I believe my failure was in deciding that I needed to grow my design skills by trying action-oriented gameplay but not accepting that story couldn’t be my main focus like it was in my 2023 jam entry. Because of the feedback I had gotten in my previous entry, I felt like story was my strong suit with my gameplay severely lacking. That’s why I set the goal to focus on gameplay which I think was the right move; however, I also wanted to embrace my strengths so I couldn’t let go of making story an important factor in the game.

To be clear, I don’t think it’s inherently wrong to want to play to your strengths while trying something new. Where I feel I went wrong was in trying to make both my top priority and refusing to let one be more important than the other. When I thought of something fun to play, I should have just followed it and made the story fit the gameplay rather than letting the story I already picked overrule the game. I’ve since participated in another jam (post coming soon) where I focussed exclusively on gameplay and was much happier with the results.

A message to those who fail

You will fail at a game jam. That’s not a threat; it’s a guarantee… and it’s not a bad thing.

Failing helps you understand where you still need to learn and it’s my opinion that the longer you go without failing, the harder that pill will be to swallow. So don’t be afraid to try new things and don’t let your failures go to waste. Learn from them by doing post-mortems (just preferably, don’t wait until 8 months after).

Negative is available to “play” on Itch; however, I’d recommend checking out the other amazing submissions to the jam instead.

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