I finished my game for the GMTK 2026 game jam! Play Five to Nine.
My not-engine, Dollhouse, ended up working great. I made some improvements to collision detection and animation management and camera movement and dialog UI, and—this is the most interesting part to me—none of it was specific to this game. I could plop new Ink and GLTF files in front of this same script and it would be something entirely different.
I also spent some time working on the asset pipeline and development workflow. I wrote a script that watches the .blend file and automatically re-exports it whenever it saves. Then in debug mode, the game saves my location and story state to the browser's storage, so I can save a change in Blender, switch to the browser, refresh, and see my changes. The next time I work with Dollhouse I want to add hot reloads so that I don't even need to refresh.
I have some reservations about Ink for this type of game. I had to sort of build around a lot of its features, but it also worked exactly as described. A really really handy thing was that I was able to test the script isolated from the world which meant I had the time and patience to add a lot more complexity than I would have if I was walking around the level and debugging the script in real time. Having that option made Ink the right choice. You can try the story-only demo with an earlier version of the script if you want!
The 3D modeling was pretty tedious but also very rewarding. I picked up a lot of tricks and muscle memory over the course of making this, but I should have trusted my instincts and not built an entire shopping mall! The first version of the game in my head took place in a grocery store, then it was a department store, then the department store became a very small part of the full game. The extreme lack of detail in the level is the biggest failure of this project and it's just an issue of scope. I made everything in this game from scratch during the jam, including the human characters, which was not my plan at the start but I am pleased with where they ended up. The 3D animating was so extremely gratifying and I'm very eager to do more of that.
This was also my first time trying UV texturing, and it went okay but it was very clumsy. I need to do some research on this; I'm sure I wasn't using Blender to its full potential here.
I plan to revisit this game after the jam voting concludes, or maybe just make something new inspired by it, knowing what I know now. The goal with this was to prove that this structure can be used to move quickly from Having an Idea to Walking Around That Idea, and in that regard it was a total success!
Now that that's over, I am pretty behind schedule on preparing for Halloween, so it is time to get spooky my friends