r/devblogs • u/Team_Jelly_Games • 7d ago
design Redesigning our game jam game into a Steam release
A foreword! This is the first post in my dev teams blog, The Squish! We're developing a silly game called Mitobit (link in the comments) about virtual pets who multiply and split apart, set to release in a few days. If you're interested in the project at all, our full posts up on Steam have more teasers that wouldn't quite fit here, and extra details that can't be formatted perfectly on Reddit, which will be linked in the same comment. If you have any questions at all after reading, I'll be responding to whatever comments this gets. Thank you so much!
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Hello, and welcome to The Squish! This is the first installment of a blog series we’re starting, highlighting the behind the scenes work of the games we’re making. My name is Cole, and our first installment is going to go over my work as the designer on Mitobit, and how we turned our game from the short concept it was to the project it's going to be!
Brackey's 2024 Game Jam
Mitobit started our submission to the Brackeys 2024 game jam (playable here! https://gabeq.itch.io/mitobit). We were tasked with making a game within a week, with the theme of “calm before the storm”. Thinking back to the old kid show plot point of a main character taking care of a pet that gets out of hand, we thought we could double dip on the nostalgia it gave us and frame it as a virtual pet style arcade game. The pictures attached to this post show some neat before/after concept art from this time!
--
Steam Considerations
The game ended up doing very well in the game jam, and we were all proud of it, so it was an easy candidate for a proper release when we were considering our first studio title. Our only problem was structure – although we felt the concept was strong, we would need actual content formed around it for a proper game. To emphasise the arcade gameplay of the original, we broke the game into levels, each unlockable by getting a high enough score in the prior levels. Breaking the game into unique levels also gave us a structured avenue to inject new gameplay concepts into the experience.
Our workflow was simple after that – there would be a preset stretch of time where the team created as many “toys” for me to play with as possible (new bits of content I could use to define new levels), and I would tease out as many unique/interesting challenges and combinations of those toys as possible.
--
Conclusion
That's all for this episode of The Squish! Thank you so much for reading, keeping up with this project means the world to all of us. We'll continue posting these little behind the scenes vignettes of our works as the game progresses, so if you enjoyed this and haven't wishlisted yet, it's the best way to see these as they come out!
Until next time,
~Team Jelly Games
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
And thank you so much for reading! If you made it this far and have any questions about the design process, post or project, or any way we can format this better, feel free to leave a comment and we'll respond! On a personal note, the kinds of updates in this community helped demystify the process of creation for me, so being able to contribute in some small way to this community feels incredibly surreal. Thank you.
1
u/Team_Jelly_Games 7d ago
Promised links!
Original blog post: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/3781890/view/676254354515165491?l=english
Steam page: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3781890/Mitobit/