In Annulus, you guide a stone-age tribe living on a ring-shaped space station. Apart from hunting and gathering, there are strange technological artefacts to study, and on occasion, there's an opportunity to shape the culture of your tribe.

As so often with game jams, I didn't really like the theme. It's almost part of the process for me now: the theme gets revealed, I complain about it, and then figure out some way of making it interesting to me.

In this case, I wanted to make a game about shaping the culture of a society through a series of decisions. The idea was that some decisions would have useful short-term consequences but establish problematic precedents, or vice versa. A big influence gameplay-wise was A Dark Room, which I both love and actually contributed a few features to.

I'd just started playing Horizon: Zero Dawn, and so a mix of high and low tech was on my mind.

Since I could already see from Twitter that a lot of people were making little globes, I wanted to do a different topology for my game, and settled on a torus. A torus is actually a lot easier than a globe to work with, and a lot of game maps, eg Civilization's, are torus-shaped.

But because I apparently wanted to make things hard for myself - and because I wanted to get some more experience with Unity - I decided to make this torus in 3D.

Roughly the first third of the jam time was taken up by trying to get Unity on Linux to work properly, then giving up and installing it on Windows instead. Once I actually had a functioning development environment, I was able to quickly write some code that created a torus out of cube-shaped prefabs.

I started creating different landscape blocks - forest, grass, water, and so on. For this I used MagicaVoxel, which I can heavily recommend for game jams. You can make decent-looking 3D models very rapidly, and importing them into Unity is also pretty straightforward.

One of the things I don't really like about Unity is its reliance on complex scene files made of prefabs. So as quickly as I could, I abstracted this away, creating some simple data formats for the world map and tile types. This worked really well, and by the end of the first day, the game could generate a torus of landscape blocks on the basis of the data files.

Now I just had to make, you know, the game. The interactive bit.

So next was creating a little tribesperson in MagicaVoxel and setting up controls that let it move around, and setting up the camera to follow it. I quite liked the vertiginous way the camera did not rotate along with the tribe's movement, and left it like that. Which admittedly did make the controls fairly confusing.

After a fair amount of fiddling with light sources and camera controls, it was time to add some content to the world. I put together a simple but powerful attribute and encounter system, again with a text-based format. The way it works is that every time your tribe moves, it checks each possible encounter in order to see if it applies, and pops up the first one that applies, if any. Each encounter would then have 1-4 choices which could modify attribute values, modify world tiles, or restart the game.

I tried this out with a simple encounter for gathering some berries - and then it was time to board a plane! Thing was, I had to be in Berlin on Monday morning to go to the Quo Vadis conference, which meant I had to travel on the Sunday. I spent my time in the departure lounge putting together more buildings and creatures for the game, including the, er Xanthelope:

and the Eruxoraptor:

Protip: If you make your animals aliens, it's not as obvious that you're really bad at 3D modelling.

After a number of delays - including having my luggage searched at Tegel Airport - "I'm not a drug smuggler, just an Indie developer!" - I arrived at my hotel room at roughly midnight local time. I had three hours left. The first hour I spent fixing up some bugs and adding in the new 3D models. The next 90 minutes I spent writing all the encounters in the game. The final 30 minutes I spent on building and uploading and submitting, finishing neatly before the deadline.

I'm pleased with the final result. The encounters are pretty basic, but I think they manage to convey the tone and experience I wanted the player to have. I know the controls are... weird, but I tell myself that's part of the game's charm. I do want to make a proper post-compo version of the game with a deeper story and more detailed ecology, but that will wait until after the judging.

Play Annulus

Scrawling some ideas for the game design on the whiteboard. The idea is to make a game where as you progress, you lose abilities, making the game harder.

A whole lot of possible abilities ranked on how interesting they'd be.

Is this going to be top-down or side-on? Mechanics-wise, both have advantages, but I think side-on will be prettier, so let's go with that!

At around 1 AM, with a solid two hours to go before the jam deadline, I uploaded and published Dryad, my 3rd Ludum Dare entry.

It's a platformer about a forest creature wishing to become human, and, uh, killing a whole bunch of humans in the process. As you become more human, your magical powers wane, and you become slower, weaker, less perceptive, making each successive level harder. You can choose the order in which you lose your powers, and some orders are easier than others.

This was actually an idea I'd been carrying around me for a few years, and this week's theme seemed like a decent fit. Development was... uneven: I'd just come back from a week of teaching and mentoring gamedev in stuffy classrooms, and so I was frankly exhausted and kind of demotivated. The original plan was to make it a compo game, but by midnight on the second day, I still had no levels for the game. I could probably have pushed myself to put something together in the final three hours, but I opted for sleep instead.

This was also the second time I used Unity for a Ludum Dare game. With Annulus, I had aggressively bypassed Unity's way of doing things, basing everything on data files and generating the game world on the fly. For Dryad, I felt that it was a good match for Unity, and so I tried to do things the Unity Way, using prefabs and levels.

Design

Having decided on the basic game idea, I wrote down a whole lot of different abilities that the player could have and then subsequently lose. I was specifically looking for downgrades that would require the player to deploy more skills or consider more things, rather than just making them weaker. A bunch of ideas I eliminated because the downgrade would just make the game slower rather than more interesting. Others, such as flight, because they would make the level design very hard: each level in the game had to be playable with any combination of downgrades, after all.

In the end I settled on the following three:

• Stamina: Initially, you can move at full speed and jump repeatedly. After the downgrade, moving and jumping deplete a stamina bar, which means you have to plan how to use your limited reserves of mobility in a given combat encounter.
• Telepathy: Initially, humans you encounter have an indicator that shows whether they're hostile. After losing this, you have to either treat all humans as hostile, or move out of cover and see if they shoot at you.
• Energy Blast Stun: Apart from your primary attack, you have a powerful secondary AoE attack. After the downgrade, using the AoE attack stuns you for several seconds, making you vulnerable to any enemies you did not take out. Again, this means you have to deploy the ability more carefully.

I also was not sure if the whole game should be side-on or top-down. Both had their advantages in terms of what scenarios they made possible, and I had more experience making top-down games. On the other hand, I couldn't really think of a way to make the game look nice in top-down, so I ultimately went for side-on.

Initial Development

I started out developing the basic platformer mechanics, player abilities, and enemy behaviours using a bunch of coloured rectangles in Unity. This involved some looking up of tutorials and rapid skipping through videos to get the information I needed, but after a few hours, I had what was theoretically most of the game in terms of mechanics and controls.

Graphical Design

Next up was the artwork. I wanted this to look decent, but I also wanted to avoid spending all my time on it. I decided to use a method I'd used in some previous jam, which was to draw the art using a single fixed pen and eraser size in GIMP. Having a fairly large pen size meant that I couldn't go and obsess about small-scale details, or at least that was the idea.

I put together a quick colour scheme vaguely inspired by Airships and Pioneers, heavy on browns and greens, with a blueish tint to the shadows. I also intended to use some basic skeletal animation for the player character and the enemies - which was probably too ambitious for a jam game, but I am terrible at hand-drawn animation, so this seemed like the easier option.

Over the next hours, I put together the parts of the player's dryad, an enemy bowman, some shots, walls, floors, and so on. I was especially pleased with the tree I drew.

Animation

In the week, we'd been looking at the 2D animation tool Spine, and I dimly remembered that Unity has its own basic keyframe animation system. I imported the spritesheet I'd made, had Unity automatically cut it, adjusted the pivot locations, and put together a simple skeleton for the player character.

Walk animations were something I'd stumbled over before, but I found a nice animator's cheat sheet to copy from, and the resulting walk cycle, while not great, at least looked like actual walking. I then added some animations for shooting, jumping, and being stunned.

Audio

Because I originally aimed for this to be a compo game, I needed to do all my own audio, which meant it was time to make some foleys using whatever random items I could find in the jam location. A tape measure being extended provided the sound for the player's magic spells, a gently tortured book on software development provided the sound of a firing crossbow.

Pictured: The traditional sacrificial foley melon, held by my glamorous assistant.

The resulting soundscape is pretty sparse, but it has the basics. Ideally, I would have added music as well, but I didn't really know what to go for.

Level Design

So by the end of the second day, I had all of that working, but still only a tiny test level. It wasn't really clear if any of the mechanics I thought of would actually work. I decided to go to bed and tackle level design in the morning.

The whole idea of the game really hinges on its level design: the levels have to interact correctly with the various abilities the player can have or lose. If choosing a downgrade makes no real difference, or choosing the wrong downgrade makes the next level completely impossible, or really tedious, the game doesn't work right.

In practice, doing this right would require way more time and level design experience than I had, so I created levels that were basically linear sequences of very specific scenarios where certain abilities would be useful: walls through which you could use the AoE attack, sequences of platforms to jump past if you had the stamina, set-ups where not knowing if an enemy was hostile required you to take a different route or enter combat at a disadvantage.

I put this all together using pencil and coloured pens on some squared paper, then set to work building the levels in Unity. In the end, the levels were pretty short, but I think they manage to present some interesting challenges depending on what downgrades you choose.

With that done, I did some quick shakedown testing, compiled and packaged the result, and put it up on itch.io. In retrospect, some more balancing would probably have been a good thing, but the game plays OK.

What Went Wrong

• I went into Ludum Dare already quite exhausted, which was a bad idea.
• Despite my attempts to reduce art time costs, I still spent way more time on visuals than on gameplay.
• Unity was at times intensely frustrating, as I was trying to figure out how to do something The Unity Way, but the only available information was in hour-long video tutorials and gently outdated StackExchange threads. In a less heavyweight environment like HTML5, I'd just have quickly coded a solution. I guess the fact that there is a defined way of doing things, even if it's buried inside a long video tutorial, is what attracts a lot of people to Unity, but it makes me itch.

What Went Right

• On the other hand, Unity was very good at letting me create a visually pleasing and actually animated game in relatively little time. Being able to visually edit the levels was also very useful once I got used to it.
• I'm really pleased with the graphics. I'm really a coding type person, so graphics are more of a side-line, but I think this once again proves that a consistent approach and colour palette can make up for a lot of missing skill.
• I would tentatively say that the core design idea may have merit that's worth exploring further.

So yes, if you want to try it, you can get Dryad here, in Windows, Linux and Mac flavours.

• Denial - page refresh Surely not
• Anger - Worst theme ever!
• Bargaining - Maybe I can shoehorn it into my idea?
• Depression - I have permanently run out of creativity.
• Acceptance - Well, actually, how about...

EARTH BLOSSOM is a compo game about an alien macro-organism on a course to devour Earth. It's inspired by Mushroom 11 and the Zerg.

Your monstrous avatar glibbers through space, following your cursor. You can spawn blisters that fire spores at the human structures trying to impede your progress. Once they are destroyed, you can devour the survivors, replenishing your mass - but don't be too greedy, or your flesh will become sluggish, or even blossom early, too far away from Earth.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tlKC8eRc2s8

At our local Zurich jam site, we spent a bunch of time talking about the theme. One of the ideas that came up was to take some game mechanical thing that's usually considered purely good, and make it a double-edged sword. For example, making a jump and run game where the coins you collect weigh you down. Or a shooter where the more HP you have, the slower you become.

I decided to take a stab at that second idea, where more HP meant a larger, slower avatar. But I didn't just want it to change some scale factor. Instead, I wanted to make a blob monster made of tiles, similar to Mushroom 11. Also, I wanted to use the new features in ECMAScript (JavaScript) 6 to do more concise and functional code.

With that decided, I started out writing the core code for managing a grid of blobs. The new function syntax in ES6 quickly became handy, and I could write elegant code like this line for finding the blob closest to the cursor:

const closest = least(blobs, blobDist(scrolledCursor));

least is a helper function that takes a list and a function, and returns the item of the list where the function returns the lowest result. Now, "give me the most X / least X thing" is something you need to do constantly in game development, which makes this kind of clean syntax really really nice.

Soon, I had basic code that would pick the blob farthest away from the cursor and move it to a location next to the blob closest to the cursor, allowing the blobs to ooze around. I then had to fiddle around with the rules a bunch to keep the blob from becoming a thin snake (require the new blob location to be adjacent to three other blobs) and from splitting (move the blob farthest away in grid-space from the closest blob, rather than the blob farthest away from the cursor as the crow flies).

Now I had a very pixely grid. I originally planned to use pixel art for the creature, but I remembered that I'd had some good results converting grids into polygons in Airships. So instead, for drawing, I converted the grid into an outline polygon, smoothed it, and then perturbed it using perlin noise to make it all wobbly.

Of course, all this clever stuff had taken most of the day. I spent the evening starting to implement enemy ships and shooting.

The second day, I added the ability to click on the creature to spawn blisters that could shoot back at the enemy ships. At this point, you could actually have a fight! In rapid succession, I then added more enemy ship types, a level system, and victory and defeat conditions.

By the afternoon, the game was sort of done, which meant I had time for extra things, sound in particular.

After a bunch of failed attempts, I managed to put together a menacing background track in GarageBand, then started on sound effects. The creature noises were a joint effort between my mouth and a tortured clementine. The ship explosion sound is a paper bag being crushed, slowed down. Only the ship weapon sound is synthesized using bfxr.

After that, I still had time, so I did some balancing, made the creature look nicer, and added heavily Zerg-inspired voice lines. To create the distorted chorus effect, I took recordings of my voice overlaid them with copies at -40%, -20%, and +20% pitch, and added some reverb.

All in all, I'm pleased with my creation. It's not a super-long game, but the creature looks cool, it's fun to play, and it feels like a complete experience thanks to the audio.

Play it here!

Try it out

Your monstrous avatar glibbers through space, following your cursor. You can spawn blisters that fire spores at the human structures trying to impede your progress. Once they are destroyed, you can devour the survivors, replenishing your mass - but don’t be too greedy, or your flesh will become sluggish, or even blossom early, too far away from Earth.

Play Headball

I was looking at random genre combinations when I got horror/sports. This piqued my interest because:

• I like horror.
• I have never made a sports game before.
• I have never played a sports game before.
• I know basically nothing about sports.

So I decided to make a gruesome turn-based hotseat sports horror game. Potentially as a way to process school sports memories.

I wanted a strong aesthetic so went for a four-color palette of black (actually dark purple), red (blood), brown (bodies), and yellowish-white (bones, eyes).

For the mechanics, I came up all kinds of horrible things to happen to players. Eventually, I narrowed it down to people's severed heads being the balls the game is played with.

From there the basic rules crystallized - you can move around if you aren't holding the head, throw it around (with blood trailing), and score by throwing it through a hoop - that last bit being borrowed from the traditional Mayan ball game.

To make it interestingly hard to score, you also have to catch the ball again on the other side of the hoop. And of course if you have ball throwing you need intercepting throws, and tackling. And if someone gets killed, their head becomes the new "ball", which leads to some interesting tactics where you can kill your own player to get ball possession...

Speaking of ball possession, with the ball being a head, it too can get in on the action. Obviously, this being hell, the head remains conscious when ripped off the body. It can bite its carrier or scream horrible things to stun people nearby.

The implementation went fairly smoothly. I started out by drawing the pieces of art I would need, like the players and demons. The four-color scheme did pose some challenges when I needed to highlight things, but I think I succeeded. The two team colors are red (Team Blood) and white (Team Tears).

I did the basic rendering of the game board and fiddled around with its size and the tile size for a bit. Then I implemented the introduction sequence where the big demon goes and rips off one of the players' heads. Next, the basic actions like selecting players and moving them. I didn't bother with any clever pathing - players just move from one point to another without worrying who's in the way.

Tackling required a bit more: the tackled player has to have a free adjacent tile to be pushed into. And the intercept rule required some logic to see who had the chance to do the intercepts.

Once I added the win/loss conditions and stuff the game was playable but still a bit dry. I had a few hours left so I hacked in some really basic animations using linear interpolation, a particle system that only supports red particles, and some quick SFX which I recorded in a single take at 1 AM.

All in all I'm pleased with the way I created a coherent aesthetic and an actually quite deep strategic game in a single day. Of course it being a hotseat game will severely limit its appeal, but there was no way I could have written an AI for this within the time available to me. I hope some people do find the time to find another player and play it properly.

Play Headball

Occult Defence Agency Budgeting Simulator: Defend the realm from vampires, werewolves, pixie swarms. Cut your budget mercilessly. Survive.

I went into Ludum Dare straight after NaNoWriMo, on a really busy weekend. But I liked the theme: "Sacrifices must be made", so I wanted to do it. Between a bunch of social engagements, it took me three days to complete my game, but I did get there.

Each Ludum Dare, I like to joke that I go through the stages of grief about the theme. Denial - Surely people wouldn't vote for that? Bargaining - Maybe if I shoehorn a completely unrelated game into the theme? Anger - People are stupid to have voted for that! Depression - I have no ideas at all. Acceptance - Well, I guess I do have an idea.

This time, this natural order of things was disrupted, and I instead found myself making a matrix of different ways to interpret the theme: On one axis was whether to take the term "sacrifice" literally, mechanically, or metaphorically. The other axis was what your relationship to the sacrifice was: are you the sacrifice, or are you sacrificing? And how do you feel about it? This approach, of finding multiple axes of interpretation for the theme and considering each combination, is definitely something I will reuse.

By the end of the first day, I had multiple interesting ideas that I now urgently needed to choose from:

• You are the employee of a company. At the end of each level, one employee gets fired. You must sabotage the other employees to make sure you get to stay.
• You are a willing human sacrifice. Your tribe has encountered a great calamity, and your ritual death will help them process it. You can choose the details of the ritual. Talk to the members of your tribe to find out what they should be.
• You are in charge of an organisation, and there are multiple rounds of budget reductions you need to deal with, while still allowing your organisation to fulfil its mission.

The first idea sounds quite fun, maybe something like a PvP version of Overcooked where you sabotage each other instead of working together. But I couldn't figure out a way of doing it within the remaining time.

I really like the human sacrifice idea, but I think it needs more time and attention given the subject matter.

That left me with the budgeting game, which had the advantage that I could implement it as a pretty simple-looking JavaScript app.

You're not just running any organisation, of course. You're running a paranormal defence agency inspired by Charles Stross' Laundry and my recent attempts at winning XCOM on hard difficulty level. It's also reminiscent of my previous Ludum Dare game Concierge, in that you have a bureaucratic job where you need to allocate things in a way that prevents disaster.

So you find yourself in charge of the Office of Paranormal Defence, a minor organ of the UK government facing heavy cuts. Your new minister - resemblance to real figures definitely intended - is keen to impose austerity by repeatedly cutting your budget. Each turn plays out as a new budgetary year, as you need to decide which activities of your agency are vital, and which can be reduced or eliminated. Do you need custom werewolf holding cells? A fancy Christmas party to lift your team's spirits? An entire research department devoted to pixies?

Cut the wrong things, and the UK will be devoured by occult horrors. So - no pressure!

There is a good ending, really. There's also four definitely very bad endings and two ambiguous ones where you can make up your own mind as to whether you've succeeded. This is another interesting thing I've come to realize: don't explicitly label your endings as "winning" or "losing". Leave it to the player to decide!

Addendum about the logo: It's of course intentionally drab and horrible. I wanted to give it a real feel of a supposedly modern and dynamic but actually staid corporate-ish redesign given to a UK government agency. I was also inspired by the horrible pixelated logos you see in old bank machine screens. "OPD" stands for "Office of Paranormal Defence", and the O has a dot in it because the original logo incorporated John Dee's Monas Hieroglyphica.

A rather verbose postmortem of my compo game, The Unstable Zone.

I was really happy to be able to do Ludum Dare outside the house again. I tried doing game jams while isolating at home, and I just can't get into the spirit of it. A jam is a bit of an altered state, and it's hard to get into an altered state if you're sitting on a sofa at home and the dishes need doing. Without resorting to drugs, I mean.

So I did Ludum Dare at the local gamedev incubator thingy I co-founded, Swiss Game Hub. About eight people turned up at various points, working on around five games, rather fewer than before, probably in part because there was a big games event going on at the same time. (And yes, we were all verifiedly vaccinated, that's why we could do it in person again.)

I believe I voted for Unstable in the preliminary round and then against it in the final round, so I had mixed feelings. But that's how jam themes always work: the moment you find out, you are convinced it's the worst possible theme and your brain refuses to come up with any but the most obvious interpretation. In this case, stacking shapes on top of each other.

We spent a bunch of time at the hub discussing the theme, enumerating things that could be unstable (buildings, people, prices, the ground, reactors, relationships, reality...) We also chopped up the theme in a number of ways. One of us suggested "Unstab Le", a game where a guy called Le has been stabbed and you have to uh unstab him. We couldn't find a good mechanic for it, but I still love the idea.

In the end, I picked the idea of an unstable economic simulation that would spiral down into a collapse over the course of the game, as a kind of antithesis to the usual build and progress style of economics games. Here things collapse and all you can do is survive. An interesting idea that I want to revisit, but after making a few notes, I realised that it was an order of magnitude too complicated. Just making the basic economic simulation would have taken me two days, never mind any actual gameplay.

So we broke for lunch, sat outside, and talked about our progress. My fallback idea was to make a game about unstable reality, an expedition game best described as "Curious Expedition meets Annihilation". You'd crawl around a map with your expedition and weird, horrible things would happen. After lunch, my friend (and previous co-jammer) Kay came by and pushed me to actually figure out the plot of this thing. We ended up playing out maybe half of the game's plot as a pen and paper session.

Things started to come into focus. I again scoped things down to the relevant parts, getting rid of the idea of being able to move around a map, and instead going for a branching narrative game.

Having played through the first half of the plot, and mostly figured out the second half, I outlined the game by placing passage stubs in Twine. I started writing some of the interactions and thought up some stats: stress, wariness, tiredness, and knowledge.

The next day, I continued laying down the game's interactions, mostly sticking to summaries in the writing. By the early afternoon it was possible to play through the game, so I inflicted it on my partner, who was at the hub to hang out and write. Playtesting quickly resulted in adjustments in balance and details, but the overall plot was already solid.

After more writing and playtesting, I had a more or less complete game by dinnertime.

After dinner, I determined that I had enough time to make a soundtrack, so I got out GarageBand and my little MIDI keyboard, and started hitting buttons. I started out with some slow classical guitars to suit the game's setting in Argentina. Later on, the music switches to a creepy droning synth underlaid with slowed-down insect noises. The soundtrack could clearly use some more work, as the transitions and pacing aren't great, but it brings across the game's mood.

I uploaded the game with 24 minutes to go before the end of the compo. As you can tell from the above, I worked at a moderate intensity, which, well, I'm not in my 20s anymore.

(Note that it's spoilers from here on, so if you haven't, do play the game first.)

The game chronicles a dangerous expedition into the "Unstable Zone", a remote area that plays tricks on people's perceptions and memories, and is inhabited by strange insects that rapidly mimic anything they come across, including binoculars, tape recorders, and people. The player explores the zone, balancing the expedition members' levels of stress and tiredness against acquiring enough understanding of the place to know how to deal with it.

The bridge the expedition uses to enter the zone collapses or vanishes, and they are forced to take the long way back, which brings them into potential conflict with the mimic insects, who have started to emulate the shape and behaviour of previous expeditions, including a deadly curiosity and potentially violent behaviour.

The structurally clever thing I wanted to add was a flashback with decisions that would change the state of the world and the available solutions once you flashed forward again. So as your memories get more muddled by the zone, you flash back to an expedition nearly a decade earlier, where you can choose whether to leave behind useful equipment for your present self, and how you interact with the mimics, which is then reflected in their behaviour towards the expedition in the present day.

Ultimately, there are a number of ways to escape alive, and yet more for at least some of the expedition to escape. The overarching plot is fairly linear until the final decisions about how to escape, but there's a lot of different paths in practice, because your decisions affect what happens in detail, and what is possible later on. This is a technique I copied from Choice of Games, whose (much longer) narrative games avoid having early branches by having the player set up details like stats and relationships through most of the game before branching heavily towards the end of the game. This way, player choice matters, but you don't have to write a million words of branching plotlines.

As for the plot and setting, it's obviously heavily inspired by Annihilation. Another influence is the lesser-known The Sick Land. I hope I did a decent job of making it not entirely derivative. All three belong to a genre of "strange zone" literature which also includes Roadside Picnic, Alice in Wonderland, Heart of Darkness, and so on.

I tried to improve on Annihilation in having a clearer underlying relationship between the core weird stuff in the zone and the way it presents itself to the reader. One of the weaknesses of Annihilation - which I generally greatly enjoyed - is that while there's a lot of cool weird stuff happening, it doesn't really ever tie together in a satisfying way. In my game, there are two core strange things: the distorted perception of the expedition members, and the mimic insects. This isn't perfect, as I think the perfect strange zone story would have a single strange thing at the center of it, which, once revealed, perfectly explains all the many weird and terrifying things that happened. (And that isn't "aliens/a wizard did it for unknown reasons".)

Except that in the comments, The Lame Brain suggested that your party are actually mimics, but as part of being mimics you also have mimic-memories from the original party. Which I think is a great twist - and it reduces the number of weird things to just one. The discontinuities in perception are because you aren't human. You're an insect imitating human behaviour based on a jumbled set of experiences.

I might end up making a post-jam version with more content and an improved soundtrack, but for now, I'm pretty happy with it.