Release

Hey y'all! I recently released a "dystopian where's waldo"-type game that I have been working on for a few months called "Say Cheese". I'd appreciate any/all feedback on the game :D

Dev Log

The concept originated during the 2024 Global Game Jam, where working with the theme "Make Me Laugh", we were inspired by "We Happy Few" and the "100 Cats" giga-franchise on Steam, and proposed a game where you're an agent of a dystopian society - where unhappiness is punished by DEATH.

Our artists had the genius idea of centering the game's art style around the corporate and generic "Corporate Memphis" art style, as a way to drive home these themes.

So we locked in for the game jam, and were able to churn out a decent prototype of our game idea in 2 days. There were some ideas that were cut for time, the game required external explanations during the demo, but we were overall pretty happy with out submission!

After the jam, @MrAozora and I decided that we wanted to just clean things up with the game just a little bit before we move on to something else. But what we didn't know was that "little bit" would turn into 3 months of on-and-off work...

Here's a visualization I hacked together from our git logs to get an idea of our timeline:

Changes Made and What I Learned

Here's a non-exhaustive list of the changes we made since the GGJ release:

• 9 more levels
• 2 new songs
• added sfx
• settings menu
• death + end game animation
• achievements
• many UI / Visual reworks
• and of course... ironed out MANY bugs

This is probably the longest I have ever worked on one game before, so it was really educational to focus more on the polishing and refining aspects of game dev.

I think we were able to immensely improve the game's understandability -- which was our biggest critique from the GGJ.

I also got to experiment with Unity's post processing effects, specifically when designing the our second "cyber-punk city" map. Below, I show what the raw map file looks like for the "cyber-punk city", but with the help of some masks, shader graph, post processing, and particle systems -- I was able to give it that cyber-punk aesthetic.

Where we struggled the most was definitely defining a fun difficulty curve. We experimented with a bunch of different level configurations, but it all felt super abstract and hard for me to wrap my head around. I'm not super confident about the difficulty curve we settle on, and it's something I want to get better at designing going forward.

Gameplay Comparison

Here's a video I put together comparing the GGJ release, and our latest release:

Thank You!

Thanks for reading my long post. Feel free to reach out to me with any feedback or questions regarding "Say Cheese" or really anything else!

Take care!

-UnitedFailures