If you aren’t learning new stuff in a jam you are probably doing it wrong.

Ben and I really wanted to challenge ourselves with both the audio side and the visual side. For the visuals I’ve been exploring shadergraph which has been super rewarding getting some really performant dynamic textures but the audio side has been even more fun.

FMOD has some really powerful timeline logic features that let you set loops and markers, and then add logic to alter playback in realtime.

For a game where we want the music to develop alongside the players progress this is of course perfect, but we’d never used this particular feature set before. Adding trigger conditions on the FMOD side opened up new possibilities for Ben to get creative with transitions and how the track develops adding hidden buildups within hidden areas of the timeline instead of jarring changes to the music.

On the graphics I created a shader graph that gets some movement into the textures. I was always inspired by American McGee’s Alice and spent a disproportionate amount of time in the ice level in particular trying to see all the creatures hidden in the ice. The effect is super subtle and you could play through the game without even noticing (in fact in many conversations I’ve had about that game most people don’t know what I’m even talking about when I bring it up).

I loved this so much I’ve been hiding easter eggs under textures ever since. It’s this multi-perspectival aspect to games which makes the medium so unique, why on earth would you not?

I also used this as an excuse to explore midjourney more as a tool for creating textures. There is a tag to make the output tile (literally --tile) and this has been a lot of fun. I then use photoshop to create a poor-man’s normal map. In production this wouldn’t fly but in the dark corners of this game it will be perfectly functional.

I had a late one last night. I do feel like the week long jam format is a good one as it lets you go deeper on different ideas, but it feels like a real jam now that I’m actually tired.

• Oliver