The Void of Lost Things

Ever wonder where lost things end up? You find yourself at the Void of Lost Things. The final opportunity to rescue things before they are lost forever. Emotional connection is the only thing stopping them from falling in. Rescuing them will return them to their owners. Sometimes, what is lost can be found.

Created by Cai Kingston / Mindez

https://www.twitch.tv/mindezzy

https://discord.mindez.co.uk

Details

A silly game about rescuing odd socks.

Controls: Left mouse button to drag.

Goal: Match the odd socks and return them to their owners.

Engine: Godot 4.2.1

Created in 3 hours for Trijam #266 (Theme: Odd Things), counting only time spent developing the game in Godot and developing assets in Aseprite. Planning, researching, testing, finding assets online, and procrastination not counted.

This project uses music that is public domain and claims to not be part of ContentID, and so should be safe to stream and record. I cannot take any responsibility for any copyright claims from third parties, but will do my best to help if one is received.

Full Development Time Breakdown

• Create Sock Masks (Aseprite, 10 minutes)
• Create OddSock scene with self modulation (Godot, 30 minutes)
• Spawn Odd Socks (Godot, 20 minutes)
• Cleanup and randomise colours (Godot, 15 minutes)
• Matching Sock scene with drag/drop mechanics (Godot, 25 minutes)
• Writing text and some bugfixes in Matching Sock (Godot, 15 minutes)
• Detecting and handling matches (Godot, 20 minutes)
• Music, Opening, Credits, Fade To White (Godot, 45 minutes)

Dev Diary

I've been looking to join a game jam for a while, so thank you to Trijam for organising it. I'm usually the kind of person to have a few hundred incomplete projects, so a deadline and a bit of motivation and encouragement to draw a line under something and say "This is done" is invaluable. And in typical Cai style, I went in big on my first game jam and went straight for the 3 hour restriction.

While I've made some simple mechanics in Godot, Unity and several other game engines before, I've never been able to put it all together into a proper game-shaped package and release it before. The game is very simple and barebones, but at least I have some experience with the process now.

It's a really interesting experience doing a 3 hour game jam. There's a weird kind of stress associated with a  self-imposed restriction, and I basically approached it like very tiny sprints - here are the three things I need to do, I want to spend about 15-20 minutes on them, there's my rough starting direction, start the timer. It actually worked kind of well, as opposed to my usual style of trying to hack things together but always staying so deep in the code that I can't see the bigger pictures - this game jam almost forces you to lift your head up and re-assess the situation every now and then.

Onwards and upwards, toward chaos we go.