Making of Dark Thoughts

The story for making this game starts in the summer of 2024. Two friends watched Pirate's stream and commented how he organized game jam, but they decided that they were late,  but made a deal to participate in the next one.

Game Jam Stream

During the stream, Thor presented polls to the audience to vote on topics in two rounds. After the topic "You Are The Weapon" was chosen, we jumped on a Discord call and started discussing ideas. To be honest, this process was around 5-6 hours. We had a lot of ideas that are obvious like making a sword that kills people.

Finally, we decided to go with a story where we will control our protagonist by influencing his thoughts. At this point we had a crazy amount of ideas, about how the story could develop, branching in different directions, but limited by two weeks, we decided to scrap 90% of it and go with as much as we could in a limited amount of time.

Start

We agreed on what kind of game we were making, and what we needed to do to create a prototype and start assigning tasks for each of us. One of us was assigned to create original art for crucial and develop a story for the game, other was to transform that story into the game. 

Process of making the game

This was the most exciting part because we are both gamers and enjoy developing new stuff. Each time someone had something to show, we jumped on a Discord call and showcased the newest part of the game, got feedback, and reiterated. 

What we learned

While our initial vision involved crafting an epic, multi-hour narrative filled with unexpected twists and turns, we quickly recognized the importance of pragmatism. Early in development, we made a conscious decision to scale back our ambitions. Rather than embarking on a sprawling, overly ambitious project that risked becoming an unfinished, abandoned dream, we chose to prioritize realistic expectations and create a smaller, more manageable experience that we could actually bring to completion. 

This focus on achievable goals allowed us to lay a solid foundation for future, potentially larger projects.