Another game jam, another game in the boot. This one has been a bit more personal, and the first one I do (almost) alone. Two years ago I participated in the first edition of the Open Culture Game Jam with Aleluya Exquisita, where we wanted to create a collaborative game where each player expanded the story of the previous one. This time I wanted to take advantage of the jam to set myself, and achieve, a series of objectives:

1. To start and, above all, to finish a game by myself.
2. To program an original dialogue system that satisfies everything I need.
3. To write and tell a story as deep, but simple, as possible.

Spoiler: I managed to accomplish all three. More or less. And even though I didn't make it into the top four games this year, achieving this meant a victory to me.

First of all, fun fact: during the entire creation of the game I listened to only one record over and over again. The Best Day by Patricia Taxxon.

Objective 1: Introduction, crux and, above all, denouement.

The principal problem and perhaps the main virtue of videogame jams is that you will never end up making the game you want to make. Realising that at the beginning of the work is crucial to even finish.

"What do I really want to do?", I thought, "To tell a story", I deduced. So that's what I did: I removed everything that didn't tell anything.

The process of devising and being able to discard quickly tends to frustrate me a lot. Thinking up interesting mechanics, stunning visuals or deep stories and then almost immediately having to part with them hurts. And the feeling of failure or helplessness that often follows hurts. Creating the minimum expression of success is not only the goal of jams, but also of videogames in general. "Less is more" is a general dogma in almost any creative field.

Goal #1 led me to think about my goal #2. "What do I really want to do?", I thought, "To tell a story", I deduced. So that's what I did: I eliminated everything that didn't tell a story. I thought: if I managed to program a convincing dialogue system in half the time the jam lasted (one week), I would spend the rest of the time and as few resources as possible on creating my game.

Sounds like a plan.

Objective #2: I'm going to speak to you in my own language.

And my language was to consist of:

• An indeterminate number of characters who must be able to speak in any order,
• with an indeterminate number of sentences each,
• showing their own name and, in addition,
• With typewritter effect.

It's not that my story needed all these things, it's that I wanted all these things. The jam was one excuse, the story was another. After three afternoons of work, I had this:

Just what I needed, so I had a free hand to really believe I was going to make a videogame out of it. Or so I thought, because this thing you see here had more bugs than a box of silkworms.

Each 'conversation' triggers in a pre-established order groups of sentences all stored in a canvas of their own. If a character intervenes several times, or if he changes his name mid-sentence, he has to have multiple canvases. It's by no means the most efficient system, besides it implied an extreme organisation of all the dialogue, but hey, as I said in my article on efficient gamification: the small flaws are the virtues that make up the essence of anything. Even one's own.

It was my system, and in all its chaotic mess, it was perfect. I had achieved my first goal, and on time! So now I could do something with it. I had invented the fork, now I had to invent the spaghetti.

Objective #3: Sit down, I'm going to tell you something.

Generally speaking, my stories have, structurally speaking, three attributes that I consider essential: a striking premise, a rhythm with a well-defined ups and downs, and an unexpected ending. I generally like to start with the first one, taking it as a starting point. I don't like stories that promise the reader or player a good plot, I like experiences that offer it from the beginning: intriguing mysteries, imaginative concepts, a deep worldbuilding, impossible situations, etc. It should be remembered that the aim of this jam was to use free-to-use assets of Spanish origin, so I decided that, since I had eaten at the Inclan Brutal Bar in Madrid a few weeks ago, I would use Noches de Bohemia in some way. The plot of The Sky of the Almonds was inspired by it. This is how the first paragraph I wrote opened:

"José Antonio Jiménez wanders drunkenly through the streets of the city. His shadow is cast on the façades and doorways of the houses, illuminated by street lamps. It is night, but José Antonio does not feel cold, the alcohol prevents him from doing so".

My intention was for the player to accompany the protagonist, the mediocre writer Don José, through his last hours before committing suicide. Quite an interesting premise, it seemed to me.

Warning: you are now entering spoiler zone. If you haven't played The Sky of the Almonds and want to read on, maybe it's a good idea to play it first.

Once I had a premise that I thought it would be interesting to develop, I began to think about the themes of my story. What do I want to talk about? The motif of Don José's suicide had to be intimately linked to it. The Sky of the Almonds talks about two themes in particular: the consequences of decisions and cowardice in making them.

Don José, like everyone else, has been forced to choose between many crossroads in his life. However, one thing that characterises him is his inability to let go of the path he has decided not to take. And if there was no other choice, he runs away from the consequences. Tired of his boring life in his Castilian village, he decided to venture out and fulfil his dream: to write. But in order to do so, he abandoned his family without even saying goodbye, shame and fear prevented him from doing so. So says the second paragraph of the project's concept paper:

"José Antonio Jiménez always dreamed of the unbridled life in the city. More than anything else, he longed for the carefree routine of hedonism that the city could offer him. But at an age that many would consider late in life, Antonio plucked up his courage and left the village for the city. Too bad he abandoned his wife and children in the process".

Jose Antonio, Don José as he was called in the city, never forgot what he had sacrificed for his dream. The memory of his family became the chains that plunged him into depression. He wrote, drank and had a good time, but in the back of his mind he thought about the consequences of his actions over and over again. After all, he loved his children and he loved his wife. Soon he began to blame himself and regret. The city he dreamed of became his prison: he could not return to the village, but the city was the living reflection of his mistakes.

"Known thereafter as Don José, he spent his time equally between two activities: partying and writing. After two and a half years he had completed a novel, which he entitled "El cielo de las almendras". However, he did not sign it as José Antonio Jimenez, nor as Don José. The novel was in the name of Hermes d'Argent".

Hermes d'Argent was the part of himself that he did not regret writing. Moreover, in this way, he prevented anyone from recognising and finding him. And the novel he wrote was nothing more and nothing less than his (very long) suicide letter. The almonds in the title, a recurring element in the game, symbolised the cyanide that would end his life. Heaven, obviously, death.

Nevertheless, the play was a resounding success. And of course, nobody knew who this Hermes d'Argent was.

"The novel was an immediate success. Hermes d'Argent's name was on everyone's lips, but his face was not. Fuelled by the mystery, the novel gained fame day after day. The King of Spain and other great personalities invited Hermes to attend parties and events on more than one occasion, but the famous author never showed up".

Don José had succeeded in writing. He had fulfilled his dream. But it turned bitter, like a rotten almond. He couldn't take advantage of it, since everyone would know who he was, but he couldn't ignore it either, since it was the result of all his sacrifices. So he did what he had always done: ignore the problem, close his eyes, and keep drinking.

"Until one evening, still on his second glass of wine, José Antonio Jiménez heard from a parishioner how Hermes d'Argent had finally presented himself to the king".

And here the game begins. Unaware of the situation at hand, someone had taken advantage of his success. So, feeling more of a failure than ever, he decides to end his life once and for all. A final act of cowardice.

The aforementioned parishioner who gives him the news is none other than death itself, embodied in an old gossip man who not only gives Don José the news that triggers everything, but also urges him to drink more and thus intoxicate him so that he makes the wrong decision. And as he does so, he is taking an old man on his deathbed.

The player, of course, does not know that Don José is Hermes himself, so throughout the play he is led to believe that it is his own mediocrity and envy that drives Don José to die. It is midway through the play, after a humiliating walk where all the passers-by in one way or another talk about the novel, that an unexpected character appears: an old friend from the village who immediately recognises Don José: Miguel Quintana.

Miguel gives us the context of José. He tells us about his wife and children, and how even after all he has done, they are still waiting for him in the village. Miguel represents Don José's past, the old problems that no matter how hard he tries to forget they always find him. Faced with this, José collapses. He decides to run to meet his end, he can't take any more.

Don José wanted to poison himself by the river, to die alone. But there he comes up against an even more unexpected character: Hermes d'Argent himself.

Not Hermes himself, of course, but the usurper who decided to take advantage of the anonymous writer's success. And although the player will see his name change in the dialogue system once he reveals his true identity, Don José, partly because of his drunkenness, partly because of the opportunity to confront himself, does not refer to him as Lucio Romero, but as Hermes. Don José does not talk to the false writer, he talks to himself throughout the conversation, as he decides, once and for all, to face his problems. To confront Hermes d'Argent.

In the end, after his monologue, Don José decides to return to the village. He has done everything he had to do in the city: he has had enough to drink and he has proved that he is a good writer. So he does two things: he gives the original manuscript of the novel to Lucio, and instead of drinking the hemlock capsule himself, he makes Lucio drink it. The next morning they find Hermes d'Argent dead by the river, with the original manuscript of the novel proving his identity, forging a legend and thus ending the mystery. Returning to the village, he will face his problems and never return to the city.

From the very beginning I didn't want to give the player the possibility to make any decisions. I didn't want, since I couldn't, to branch the narrative or create alternative endings. I wanted to give it an arcade feel by hiding conversations and at the end of the game the player would see the ones he had left out along the way. Consequences of this can still be seen, as most conversations are not mandatory, only those that are absolutely essential to understand the plot. The rest just builds upwards.

Arguably, Almond Sky is not a game per se, but a graphic novel. Honestly, I don't really care. As a Game Designer, my works are (digital) experiences where the important thing is to convey a message. If the player / user comes out of them with the slightest reflection, or having had a different time to what he/she is used to, it's a resounding success.

Objective 3.5: Hey, not just anything goes.

One of the obligations imposed by the jam, in exchange for not owning a theme, was the obligatory use of freely available assets and resources of Spanish origin. This implies assets that: the author of free and free to use, own assets (obvious) or assets whose intellectual property has passed to be open, since its author died more than 75 years ago. Remembering objective 1, I wanted to dedicate as few resources as possible to anything other than the plot or the dialogue system, so I decided to cut out everything that needed public domain Spanish paintings: Goya, Sorolla, Zurbarán...

I didn't care about the fusion of aesthetics, styles, etc. I thought it would be interesting to mix it up. However, finding the right assets was an odyssey. Complete houses with nothing covering them, general views of cities or towns... most of the paintings are portraits or views where someone occupies everything, leaving the buildings and props almost useless.

Extra objective: A story for everyone.

I finished the project, as I wanted to, one day before the deadline. I handed it in without delay, I didn't want to have that worry in my head for the rest of the weekend. I had worked a whole week on the game and now I wanted to rest the remaining Sunday. However, even though the project was finished, it was not accessible. Now that I had done it, if I wanted it to do more than just present it to the jam, I had to bring it as close to the public as I could. And that meant two things: translating it into English, and making it as user-friendly as possible.

Unfortunately, the texts of The Sky of the Almonds are not saved in any json or text file. They are inserted by hand in Unity's own editor, so the solution I came up with in order to have two languages available was to duplicate all the scenes and make the player choose which ones they wanted to go to. The height of inefficiency, but it was the most immediate solution that the structure of my project allowed me. That meant reintroducing, one by one, every line of translated text. A job that took me a good four hours, approx, of cntrl + c and cntrl + v. I also had to extend the start-up animation to allow the player to choose language, something that was more complicated than I expected.

My other task was to turn the project into something really accessible. This meant not making anyone download an .exe that only worked on Windows. Who downloads anything nowadays? Nobody. I made two other decisions: to make my game playable in the browser and on mobile. And with only one build.

This brought several problems. The first one is that on browser I needed a full 1920x1080 resolution, or the UI would get messed up, but also mobile phones have a much smaller screen size and on top of that it varies a lot between different models. I had to experiment a lot to reach a correct resolution that didn't break anything. The second problem was input. The game was built to be used with a keyboard, where there are several keys available and not a single screen. Also the game makes it impossible to perform various actions at certain times in order to create the correct timing. This was broken when the only possible input is touch. As I said, I didn't want two different builds, so all my inputs became things like: "If the player presses the 'space' key or touches the left side of the screen..." it was a bigger hassle than I thought to get anything to break, but in the end it worked with both modes. And even now I know that there are times when, if someone was determined, they could break the game, but to do so would be too Machiavellian. One lesson I take from it: a universal build brings more problems than long-term solutions.

This may be the longest article I have ever written, and perhaps for the most uninteresting topic I have ever covered: a small game, played by a hundred people at most, of a jam that didn't win. However, I like to reflect on why I do things, and I think there was a lot to tell behind this particular one. I really enjoyed creating and writing The Sky of the Almonds because, as I said, it was a very personal game. Throughout my career there have been very few occasions where I have been able to make something so mine and mine alone, so this special moment deserved a badge like this.

I doubt very much that you've made it this far without having played the game, so thank you very much for playing The Sky of the Almonds. I sincerely hope you enjoyed playing it as much as I did. See you in the next one.