Hey all! I'm doing a postmortem for HyperTale! This was my game project for RoadTripJam2025 and first completed game project ever. This will be a great chance to show off my thoughts on making the game and to justify the dozens of hours I spent on unused assets.

Hope you enjoy! There will be some spoilers, for those who are worried about that. Also this is my first devlog ever, so uh...pardon the mess.

[Minor Spoilers Ahead!]

Oh boy, where to start...

This was the first gamejam I've ever entered, and also the first time I've ever tried to complete a game. 

By complete, I mean a full story, characters, levels, and credits. Something that felt like a full experience.  It didn't have to be massive, but I wanted to really push myself and get out of my comfort zone. I knew my way around Godot a bit, Blender a bit, Audacity, Aseprite... and yeah, this project basically became my entire personality for a month and a half.

[The Hopper interior and characters were originally going to be all 3D, here's some unused models, but oh boy that was too ambitious]

The general premise was easy enough. I'm sure to no one's surprise StarFox was a massive influence, as the old SNES game was my introduction to video games in general. I've always wanted to make a game that paid some homage to it. However, since the theme of the Jam was Roadtrip it seemed to make sense to make the game more personal with elements of family and a bit more emotion and lower stakes. So the general idea was a family in space, trying to do something important but not universe ending, which was saying good-bye to a loved one.

[Early screenshot - never could get the "no energy" comments to work right.]

Was a rail shooter the right idea for a first game? Probably not...it's a genre that's really about launching endless assets at the player as quickly as possible in a rapid-fire 3-4 minute level. A spaceship/obstacle that took an hour to model and implement might only be on screen for a third of a second. Sure you can reuse assets (and I certainly did) but it's so easy to bore a player if there's nothing new to read/shoot/dodge in any given second. I am really happy there's in-between level conversations to balance out rail-shooting and bring the game back to something more relaxing.

[Adding a last-minute ranking screen was a fun way for friends to show off how they played the game.]

I'd say my biggest regret with this game is not having another week or two to make 6-7 new enemy types, a proper final boss and way more dynamics between levels. Maybe one more level.

But wow, it’s so easy to get disorganized on your first project and waste a lot of time. Empty folders, names out of order, resources not exporting because you didn't know Godot might miss exporting everything in non-debug versions...why is everything ten times harder than it should be? Did I really spend two days debugging those beam drones? Why won't that boss spawn on the second level!? Definitely my biggest weakness overall. 

My professional programming friends were quick to point out this problem never goes away, even a little bit.

[I hated this guy like you wouldn't believe.]

As far as the theme and visuals go, I really wanted a lot of...well...childhood. I wanted big bright colors, simple shapes and fast arcade action. I wanted the characters to be hopeful and carefree. Something with optimism! It's a childhood that grew up a little with you. Sure, there's a horrible sentient robot space war going on, but they still have each other, so what does it matter? 

[UI design is my passion.]

I didn't want to make a game people wanted to just click through like homework, but rather something they engaged in a bit more. It really meant a lot to hear players say they've gotten to know Aura, Kolo and Rand a bit right before the end. It felt great getting the point across in the main dialogue, but also giving out a few more tidbits and character for those who clicked around the ship a bit more. For what it's worth, getting that dialogue system to work and drawing out all the character portraits was what I was most proud of, I think.

[Kolo chants a spell while the dialogue system breaks yet again.]

But WOW, once you get to that point where all you have to do is feed arrays to your game and you're just typing out a script for the game to play back for you, it's such an amazing feeling. You get to design! You know...make a game, tell a story!

[You mean I can just type whatever and they'll say it!?]

So, am I proud of it? I'd say so. Er, mostly. It's a good start overall.

I'm really thankful for the support and understanding I got while working on it, the Bluesky likes, my Discord friends, my family, I'm really lucky for that. I’m still so new to indie dev and social media that getting such a positive reaction from the start really meant a lot to me, especially considering what an anxious wreck I am as a person, heh.

Would I come back to it and make a 2.0 version with more levels, enemies, abilities, etc.? If there's interest, certainly would. Spending so much time with these characters leaves you with a mental tattoo. It's hard to move on completely after dropping hundreds of hours on something.

[Unused waterfall image for the ending, just wasn't pretty enough.]

But... there's always more stories to tell, more you want to build and show people. Whether or not that's through HyperTale doesn't matter too much to me.

Thanks for reading!