How I Made a Full Game Out of a Game Jam
Welcome to the first dev log of A Taste of the Past, a narrative sidescroller about motherhood, Asian food, and grief! Reconnect with your mother on a train in the afterlife as you complete cute cooking minigames, learn how to love yourself, and converse with your ancestors.
I’m Emily, the lead and writer for this project — and I’m here to tell you about our development process.
For background, we originally made A Taste of the Past for Ludum Dare 48, a three-day game jam with the theme “deeper and deeper.” After the support for our game, we realized, “What the hell, why don’t we keep going?” We’ve been adding new content and fixing bugs ever since.
If you’ve played our game jam version, we’ve since rewritten most scenes, redesigned our main character, added new sound effects, addressed bugs, and improved our animations. We also have a plan for a new scene — we won’t reveal the idea behind it — but I will say it involves wrapping soup dumplings .👀 We’re preparing to launch our trailer and Steam page by the end of August, so exciting stuff is coming!
Regarding promotional material, I’ve also been running our Twitter page; I’ve come to the realization that I am Not Good at Social Media. Seriously, I have no idea what to post besides the occasional art update, and every week I try to convince someone on my team to give me TikTok ideas (none yet, but I’m still at it). So, by writing this dev log, this is my way of telling you: Please show mercy to my poor marketing strategies and talk about our game to your friends because I am not great at spreading the word. Also, if you have any ideas for what you’d like to see, please tweet us!
BUT, I am working on a comic that will be released on Twitter and Webtoon soon. It’s about Mei’s hilarious failed adventures in learning how to cook with her mother. I’m writing and drawing it (another artist is helping out as well! Her name is Ray. She’s cool.); we’ll post episodes for ~10 weeks, depending on how lazy we get and our art speed.
We also have a website! Being the lead for this project means taking on tasks that no one wants to do but needs to be done, so here she is: a website for you to stalk our devs, learn about our games, and check out our socials.
I hope to release more dev logs soon (again, depending on my laziness — please bombard me with your dev log requests so I stay on track). See you soon!