At long last! Say Cheese’s Final Build is Here!

A long time in the making, the culmination of a few months' work (on and off) has reached its conclusion.

What started off as a small weekend jam submission during Global Game Jam 2024, ended up becoming much more. A work that all the dev members are super proud of!

GGJ 2024

GGJ-2024 was a blast. Working with the theme of “Make Me Laugh”, we had an idea for something that was ironically funny. Our ideas came in the form of a dystopian setting, corporate style, and something about lasering people. What if you were the baddie??

We had a huge inspiration in the form of the “100 Cats” games on Steam, as well as “Where’s Waldo?”. Our artists had an immediate hit with the idea of bringing the Corporate Memphis style into the game as our base. It’s the kinda stuff that corporations have made generic across the art world. It was perfect!

So, we created a small game where you are an agent of a dystopian society and had to keep it that way by eliminating imposters that threatened your perfect corporate world. Via a giant floating eye that shoots down lasers of course.

It was pretty crazy how quickly it was put together. Our artists did a fantastic job coming up with a style that looked like Corporate Memphis. Sound was also quick. A cool theme was inspired in parts by games like “Danganronpa” and “Please Don’t Touch Me”. However, the hardest part was managing the items you would use to find these imposters and randomizing the NPCs. Our programmer really took the 24/7 grind to heart.

Bugs took forever to handle, and in the end we only had 1 level out of a possible 3 level arc that would give you a high score. It was lacking a few ideas we had (we didn’t even have our scroll to zoom feature) but even so, we had a game that we loved!

After the game jam, life got busy again, so we left the game as it was.

But, we knew we couldn’t leave it like that, we still had ideas we wanted to implement to make it a complete experience. So, we went to work!

The Complete “Say Cheese!” Experience

At first, we just wanted to complete the 3-level arc we had originally thought of. Increase the difficulty, make a clearer UI system, and add the gameplay features we originally wanted to implement like zoom. But, just because we thought we had a small goal, didn’t make it any easier. It was tough to get everyone together again, we had school and work to focus on, but we did what we could in our spare time. Illustrator even ran out on our audio designer, who took up UI during this phase. He had to work on the new elements entirely in Canva (which is not a fun experience), purely because he knew the program already. But wouldn’t you know it…it was slowly but surely coming together!

As we kept going, we found new ways to expand the gameplay experience. We created a new instructions panel in-game to help people understand how to play the game much quicker, new level design rules, and even achievements that you could earn in-game. Eventually, we knew we had to expand. We sketched out map ideas, and ended up with 2 more maps that could fit this little universe we were creating.

We decided on 10 levels of increasing difficulty that gave the player new maps, challenges, and new “vibes”. New music and sfx was created, older sprites and UI elements were recreated (once we got Illustrator back up!), and an idea for a complete game loop was being crafted. It’s funny how many times we thought we would be finished, just for us to meet up again and add even more things to the game.

Initially, we had an idea for a “one-shot” game loop. You try your best to get through all 10 levels, without losing once. You had the battery timer dictate how close you were to losing, and if you wiped out it would be a permanent game over. Start over from the very beginning. We even crafted an “ending cinematic” to reward those who successfully made it to the end.

But after lots of playtesting from friends and family, we started to rethink this. Thinking back to GGJ, we knew we had to make a game that was open to players of all skill levels. Players come from all backgrounds, and some are hardcore achievement hunters, but others are just here for fun. We scrapped the one-shot and came up with checkpoints instead, tweaking and balancing the game rules as we went along. This way, one can play through the game and complete it (with a bit of challenge of course), without worrying about having to restart all over. Those who wanted the experience of a higher difficulty setting could aim for the achievements, which gave the feeling of a “one-shot” experience. This was the perfect style of gameplay in our eyes.

All that was left was to smash some bugs out, finesse some more rules, and of course play test it a billion more times. Thus, after a lot of hard work, Say Cheese is finally finished. We’re very proud of this project, as it was a first for many things. Thanks to everyone who’s tried out the game before this, all the people we forced to play test again and again and again, and those who gave us amazing feedback on our crazy ideas! We hope you enjoy our little slice of dystopian I-Spy!

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Last but, not least, check out this before and after video of our first release vs our last release!

And here's the timeline!

Let us know how you like it, and if you grab any sweet medals on your way 😀

Good luck in the dystopia!

MrAozora, UnitedFailures, 27mth, Kiy0shi2099