Hi where do I start? It's been a while, but I'd like to talk about what went through the process of the game. First I'd like to start off by saying thank you for enjoying this rough concept of a game, and for the criticisms and kind words. We really appreciate the feedback, genuinely! We're not coders as you can tell, and most of our friends are either artists or writers. (I was trying to learn on the spot, actually).

When we first created the small "Samecell" team, it was mostly off a joke of having a "Same Braincell" since we seemingly always had a synergistic quality to our team. We're really just a group of friends haha. I approached Konq and Jim first, since we were all writers and I asked them if they'd like to do a small but quick project with me! That's when it started. Jim threw out a concept called Under//World, a game back in high school he wanted to give life to, but never did. It featured a little girl, and her hellish hellcat plushie named Winston. It was meant to be a puzzler game, but none of us had the experience to code that, and so we decided to try our hand at something a little simpler. I had experience in Visionaire Engine, though minimal, so I was planning to make that work.

About a week before the jam started, I invited two more pals to the team, a good friend of mine named Nights (Nights2Dreams) and my friend Joel (JoopLooper). Nights was interested in a sprite artist job, so I suggested this as portfolio work, while Joel I wanted them to help me code and build up our teamwork skills in general. Joel and I had been already working together for quite some time (3-4 years now! Wow!) At around this time, I suggested the name Allie to Jim, as a play on "Alice in wonderland" and thus "Allie Cat" was born!

I wanted to make Allie fairly simple looking, a "cat like" normal little girl. It did cause a little confusion for Nights, but we had it figured out later haha.

She eventually gave us other palettes to work with. We appreciate her hard work!! (The sprites were done during the actual jam).

You can tell which one we ended up with.

Anyways, this is kind of where the trouble started, when the jam was just starting. Time. We didn't have a lot of it, and not only that but a good majority of us had jobs, but we wanted to try anyways. Our time schedules were completely all over the place and one of our main writers (and composer at the time) ended up suffering severely from IRL life, and his job leading us to having a panic over not having the resources to do what we needed + Lack of communication. Nights was working really quick when the jam started, she cranked out a LOT of the visuals and in short succession. It was crazy to me! Joel, my other coder at the time, got busy due to life, and they were strung out due to their job at the time.

I got to work on a game doc. Reorganizing our ideas, putting it down. We were scattered monkeys but I tried my best to keep up with my team. I also kept being pulled away by life, and at this point, we probably needed another person to help, no matter how minimal.

I also created spreadsheets to keep track of what assets we needed or created. I wasn't kidding about Nights being fast, she just started pumping them out like crazy and I couldn't keep up haha). I found myself using this quote quite often:

"Jesus Christ, Nights."

Despite the trouble we had with schedules being arwy, we had a story about Death we wanted to tell. Originally, it was about Allie going to hell, but we kind of started to develop the story from that. Tried to make it as simple as possible, and so from that, birthed the idea of a kooky plague doctor named Death.

(First image Konq, Second Joel and Third Shou) Around this time, an idea of an antagonist sparked from Jim. He created this.

Which, the idea of Comedy and Tragedy arose from Konq. Leading to these two.

"Fear and Terror" Phobos and Deimos.

I came up with an idea of a conjoined twin, conjoined at the back.

Came up with this guy, named Pachinko!

Around this time, I invited one final friend to the project. Dermiss! Unfortunately, probably a bad choice on my part, he has a job and also got really busy. But he was always interested in game design, and I always liked his fresh view on things. He gave plenty of unique insight to the game, and I'd love to hear his thoughts more!

Little did I know, a hard choice would come to pass. With about a little over a week left, we had to face a tough choice. Most of us are from a comic writer's background, game design was rather new to us, so we came at it more from a writer's perspective. None of us are new to tight deadlines however, as a good majority of us entered Comic Tournaments for fun, so working under pressure was no problem. We knew we had to cut corners, and quick. So, we decided we had to do a "proof of concept" of the demo and game we WANT to make one day, but with the lack of proper skills and time resources, we couldn't at the moment.

We knew we were going to cut it close. Very. Close. Sleep was our worst enemy. I personally had bad insomnia, and without proper rest, work was slow, stagnant on my end. Nights had worked on the backgrounds, and I decided that since our main composer was out of commission, I just took on the role of composing music quickly out of a program called Beepbox.

Naturally of course, this being a point and click, I was trying to think of simple puzzles to implement. Nights has prior experience and helped give me a lot of suggestions (bless her). Week one was a hell of a lot of fun, but we were trying our best to keep things going, no matter how rough. At this point we've kind of accepted that we were gonna have a rough game, but it was better than not trying. At this point, we made posts to twitter about it!

https://twitter.com/suraiyalangrood/status/1391895509946798085

https://twitter.com/TheSkullHare/status/1391892054758891527?s=20

I...truthfully was very surprised when I found out my tweet ended up embedded on a Adventure Gamer Digest...Honestly, it made us wanna keep going, the idea that a silly little game could end up as something maybe finished in the future? But for now, we focused on what we wanted to do, a proof of concept, no matter how rough.

At this time, I created a logo. And also a poster, mostly for fun. (Probably wasn't the best idea, but I work fast.) I wanted to get the general vibe down, to see if I can get across what mood I wanted in the game. It actually helped a lot with the backgrounds (Thanks Nights!), surreal aspect (Thanks Jim!), and my own music making strangely enough.

We also had our cast lined up, roughly. Coding was the next big challenge. And that was the biggest hurdle.

Both Joel and I have "coded" in Visionaire before, making a workable game in under a month. Problem was, I at the time, had no idea how team files worked. So half of the assets were over on Joel's side, and I was stuck unable to work on the same things, lest we merge the project together and risk losing the progress either I made, or they made.

It caused a large, fustrating gap in communication, and at the time, my life had a huge rift that ended up striking the main cord of communication so to speak. I had to deal with a lot of family business and family drama so to speak within the final week, hindering me from reaching my computer at all at times, or when I did, the game broke. I couldn't figure out how to get NPCs to work, things just randomly disappeared, we followed tutorials, but Something always just went wrong. Bad luck, we suppose. I often heard Joel on their days off yell this at the screen:

"How do I get it to unfuck itself?"

Unfortunately I didn't have good luck either. The technology gods hated me. For some reason, the hitboxes just weren't working. It sucked. Things would disappear, not work, things would just have random bullshit happen. I had to hold things together with duct tape and glue "hotfix" solutions that weren't viable. Even if I had the hitbox in the RIGHT position, for some reason it just ended up really off. I kind of gave up at this point, the deadline was creeping up on us.

The last 48 hours were a blur. Dermiss helped storyboard a scene, maybe threw out some suggestions or concepts, he got really slammed with life so I don't hold anything against him. It was really bad timing for all of us collectively, and I just wanted to get a product out there, no matter how rough, and prayed that the concept was enough for people to be interested in and wanting to see more. Nights somehow had managed to crank out two full animations? WHICH I'M STILL SHOCKED BY? And if you ask her how she did that it's always a "I have no idea."

Scrapped storyboards by Shou

Background concept by Jim, Finalized by Nights.

Despite everything, we still pushed on, admittedly I had a couple panic attacks here and there due to the time running low, and things just falling apart last minute. Probably not the best, but the team really did help keep our heads up despite the rough things happening. The thing that took the most out of my time however, was a family incident that happened right within the last 12 hours of the jam. I didn't get any sleep that night, and it had made my work slow, and frankly very sloppy. Joel meanwhile had strange luck with the engine and got things to work. I remember their excited "Holy fuck I can't believe that worked." and that reigniting the fire, and holy shit did that little spark of "I got it!" help us finish the proof of concept, it was rough but god, thank fuck. We got it done however, and despite all the bad things that had happened, we were really shocked at the positive reception it received.

The fact it was streamed by streamers, and played by even small lets play channels really surprised me, and it makes me want to join more jams in the future! (As well as uh, well, working on this and fixing it). We're well aware of the dialogue being rather fast, but we had no time to fix it, as with many of the bugs in this game (I'm so sorry). There aren't enough words to say how grateful I am with how welcoming this community is and how positive you are towards my team and I's growth!

Despite everything, the experience we had was really fun! It was tough, challenging and made me suck at something! Which I always enjoy, and look forward to learning more and polishing my skills as the years go by! I'd also like to thank my team for all the hard work they did, despite all the trouble, and no matter how small, we all did a part in creating the weird twisted world of AllieCat!

And from the team, from the bottom of our hearts, we do thank you, and hope to see you soon! We have plans to possibly expand this into a bigger project, when we find the time and resources to sit down and talk. We've all got kind of got our own things going on, but none of us really want this project to die. When we're ready to expand, we'll let you guys know, but in the meantime, you can ask us questions over at our email: [email protected]

Thanks again!

Shou Tuzi (Skull Hare Studios) and the rest of us over at (Team Same Cell)