The Jordan House - Brief history

Hey all, vanpassinby (jordan house coding+art lead) here.

Now I don't expect many of you to have been here since day one, so here's a bit of history behind Jouse:

• In April 2021, Jordan Keuring released this video as an inside joke / shitpost.

• A couple months later, on August 1st 2021, KingBoneless came up with what evolved into the main premise of this game--- You, a random guy, enter a mansion of people from the previously referenced server and there's wacky clones of one guy. That's basically what we started with.

...Yeahh in case you couldn't tell, this game is also just a really elaborate inside joke and/or shitpost. If you aren't into these kinds of things you can kindly leave, lol. Anyway,

• On that same day, Prospero decided that a game should be made on this premise because why not. A few other people enter the dev team, myself included. We started development with RPG Maker 2003 for reasons that I don't remember anymore. I'm guessing it's because it was very accessible for beginners, as literally noone from the team had any gamedev knowledge at that time, lmao

  
  

(Old Jouse footage from 2021-2022, courtesy of Prospero)

• In September 2022, we decided that RPG Maker was too limiting for our scope, so we switched to GameMaker. However, there wouldn't be much activity during that time as we (primarily I) were still learning the ropes of GML (we had zero knowledge on it at that time). Only in March of 2023 did progress start to show.

(Old Jouse footage from March 2023)

• On November 5th 2022, a Discord server was opened to allow more people to contribute with ideas and whatnot to the game, as it was made with a "by the community, for the community" mindset.

• Progress was relatively steady, quite a few notable features have been implemented since then. Though, I started the game from scratch again somewhat early in development in November of 2024, since some of the important code was getting too hard to navigate, down to a point where I didn't really see a better option.

  

(Some of the latest features that were in the works before starting over: Tasks + Sam's Journal)

And overall we gained some more dev team members and we lost some, and that's... about it in terms of history. I will tackle what we did this fall/winter in this month's actual devlog.

I might have glossed over some things but oh well. They don't call it a brief history for nothing.

If you actually read this until the end, you're really cool lmfao