(I absolutely forgot to post this after all the festive stuff. Holy heck, my brain is scattered. Sorry I’m late >_<)

The meeting is now in session, let’s get down to business! =^.^=

Hello, world! I’m Avery; I made the music for Assembly Blitz, as well as helped here and there with scripting and early UI prototyping. I come to you today on behalf of Snailpass Games, and of our collaboration for Godot Jam 3, and lemme just say right out the gate that this was one heck of a ride. Massive congratulations to all our fellow entrants in the jam for making it and especially to the winners (all very well deserved!), and again, a factory-sized thanks for the unbelievably good reception our game has seen! I assure you all the the Assembly Blitz has only just begun, and this factory’s gonna grow big-time.

But before we get too excited, let us address the elephant in the room first: the game’s user experience needs some optimization. Badly.

The Bug Report

Sadly, as much as we wanted it to be, the game wasn’t quite perfect. We hope the issues you guys were facing haven’t been too much of an annoyance during the rating period. From the comments on the game’s jam entry page, this is what you’ve said are the primary issues with the game in its current state:

• Occasionally, the Stamp! minigame will automatically fail immediately upon starting.
• When playing the Connect! minigame, the wire conduits’ hitboxes are difficult to reach for many players.
• The game could benefit from additional audio feedback from various actions.

We, the developers, also identified some points we want to address:

• I know you guys said you like the music, but I really think I can do a lot better now that I don’t have a deadline to meet, so I wanna overhaul the existing music and add some new tracks too. Maybe even release the OST for free as a downloadable extra afterwards. ;)
• The UI layout can get a little funky on some displays where itch changes the viewport size a bit (for me it’s a bit wide and the UI elements are all to the left a bit; lemme know if you guys see that too).
• The Refuel! minigame either has some imprecision in where the target fill line ends up compared to its hitbox, or it needs to chill out a tiny bit about getting An Pixel more fuel than expected.

We are absolutely planning to do an update to address all of these points, and are already researching fixes for the most important issues. So those of you who are either still playing the game now or just finding it for the first time, stay tuned for a nice big Post-Jam Bugfix Blitz! We aren’t 100% sure when it’ll be out as we’re now making preparations for another jam project, but hopefully you guys will get it before the year’s out. No promises, though. We’re kinda having to rush to get ready for this one.

With that out of the way though, time for some developer commentary.

The Final Hours of Assembly Blitz

Many of you correctly observed that the gameplay loop is heavily inspired by the WarioWare series. Heck, the design statement for the game was basically “WarioWare but it’s a factory run by snail people.” When we had our day-one planning meeting over Discord, Snail threw this idea out there on our kanban boards, and out of the 7-ish we came up with, both of us quickly fell in love with the concept of cute lil’ snail people running a factory in such a cartoony and fun way. Our objective was to make a game where you performed various jobs around the Snail Co. Manufacturing Plant to assist in the assembly and distribution of completed goods, with that fact being what fit the theme of the jam: Assemble. Although I will admit that the theme wasn’t as obvious as we would’ve hoped in Assembly Blitz, it is definitely there at least in the background. I thought so, anyway. =^.^=

Snail used Blender to make the scenes for the minigames, and did the animation and scripting. We really wanted each minigame to be unique, so we spent at least a few hours brainstorming what all we wanted to do. Due to time constraints, two of our ideas didn’t make it into the final product: a Weld! minigame where you would click and drag along a predetermined path to weld parts together, and a Paint! minigame where - you guessed it - you paint stuff! Due to various issues during development the Deliver! minigame ate up a lot more production hours than we planned for, so we had to compensate for those losses to deliver something in time for the Jam. By far, the minigames took up the most production time and effort, since they’re the elements that players are interacting with most commonly. Both of us tested the games multiple times during development, and as it turns out, there’s differences between running a Godot game locally and running a web build in a browser, so there was a couple things we ended up missing before we submitted. Despite this, however, you guys seemed to still enjoy the game and provide really good feedback on how we can improve, so improving the game is just what we’ll do. :D

Meanwhile, I was put in charge of making the music. To be 100% honest with you, I didn’t actually have any specific thing I was basing the title theme off of; an idea for how it should sound just kinda appeared in my head on the night of Day 4 and I went “Yup, that’s the one!” and immediately fired up LMMS to get it put together. It runs at 150 bpm and features a bright and happy saw-wave synth lead tuned to C major, which turned out to have the exact kind of energy you’d expect from uplifting and energetic music played during a corporate onboarding presentation (which is why we named the song Onboarding Presentation). All of the music runs at the same speed, and the “Game Loops” - the music we play during each minigame - are all ~12 second tracks derived from the rhythm of Onboarding Presentation. The idea there was to design the game’s music so that there was something playing at all times, and that each track would easily flow into another. At the last second though, we decided to add really fast fading transitions between all music tracks, because we were worried that the Game Loops invariably being cut off would be problematic to the user experience. Maybe that didn’t work as well as we wanted it to, but you guys didn’t seem to complain about this, so I won’t either.

Snail has been an independent game dev for quite some time now, but as for me, AveryTheCatto =^.^=, I’ve only ever released a couple really simple mods for Volcanoids on the Steam Workshop. Assembly Blitz was the first entire game I’ve ever worked on that ended up surviving to be publicly released, so you can imagine how special it was to see the game be so well received, and all the constructive comments we’ve gotten about how the game can be further improved. I sound like a broken record saying that this is the sort of thing that keeps indie creators full of life and motivation, but that is a genuine, whole and impartial, certifiably profound truth. I have every intention on continuing to collab with Snailpass Games to deliver more content, as well as making some playable experiences of my own now that I’ve learned so much from doing this.

But make no mistake, this isn’t just about me! Snail did a lot of the heavy lifting for this project as well as acting as the leader among us two, and I feel like I still have much to learn from them even if neither of us are exactly masters of the art. True mastery isn’t about being the very best like no one ever was, it’s about the practice and dedication you put into what you do, and the constant search for improvement through experience and the people you meet along the way. This project could only have been as successful as it was because neither of us were working alone. And when we finally submitted the game, that was the first game jam we completed together out of three consecutive attempts. How strange it sometimes felt, thinking about how we actually released something for once, but at the same time, the relief and excitement was beyond words, especially when we saw the game get played 60 times in Rating Day 2 alone. Throughout the entire rating phase of the jam, there’s been more than half as many total browser plays of our game than there were views on it, which neither of us were expecting in the slightest or the greatest (my best bet was a ratio of maybe 30%). You guys really lit up our hearts, you know that? <3

Closing Remarks & Plans for The Future

Assembly Blitz performed beyond all expectations thanks to all of you, and we would love to give it the care and attention it desperately needs. Although we can’t give you an estimate on when the update will come out, we can tell you what we’re going to do with that update:

• Fix the issues with minigames that people are having
• Improve the audible feedback and music of the game
• Implement new features such as an online leaderboard, and a couple new minigames if we have time for it

We’re also thinking of a few more things for the game’s future beyond v1.1:

• A new game mode that more closely fits the theme of assembling things
• Endless Mode modifiers like Hardcore and Rhythm
• In-game collectibles based on how much of the game you’ve played
• Some fun free downloadable extras, because we love you guys :D
• Probably a couple other things I’m forgetting

It’s truly an honor to be able to make this game for you all, and we hope you’re having as much fun as we are. The Assembly Blitz has only just begun, and it’s already been an awesome time for me and Snail. Please feel free to drop any suggestions, comments, or questions you may have. I promise both of us will read every single one of them, and we’ll do our best to provide answers where needed.

Thank you all for coming on such short notice. Have fun, be safe, and stay efficient! =^.^=

Meeting adjourned, board members dismissed.