Well, well, well. Helloooooooooooo video game enjoyers. I hope you are having a LOVELY week. 

Now that seekL is out in the world, I'd like to take a few min to review how the game got put together. If you haven't played the game yet, i HIGHLY recommend playing it first. I'll post a walkthrough sometime this week for those who are trying to chase all 3 endings, too. 

Let's get fucken started. 

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The Scope  / Jam

This dev period went really, really well. I did some work in the first month, went on a 10 day vacation (with Allie to go visit some friends in the UK), then finished the  game. We had a couple late nights in the last week, but it honestly wasn't that bad! Our artist also went on vacay towards the end, but got most of the work done beforehand pretty quickly. 

I don't do 2-month jams anymore, so the only other jam I can compare this to was the jam where Blooming Panic was made 3 years ago. And this jam went so, so much better. There were a few reasons why -- here's a list in no particular order. 

• Experience level. For bloomic, I was learning as I went, and had < 1 year of renpy experience at all. By seekL, I've added 3 years of experience. Not only did I know more about renpy (+ other engines at that point), but because I had participated in many short jams (ty ludum dare), I now could work fast. If I had made bloomic today, I'm pretty sure it would have taken maybe 1 week to program it all together (not counting writing/art/etc). It's night and day! 
• Scope. We didn't want to crunch and lose weight and hate life again like we did during bloomic development. So, we only did 1 route for seekL. This gave me room to figure out the mechanics of the programming mini-game, which seemed easy at first, but grew complicated as we tested it with others. More on that later. Low scope also let us all have those vacations and breaks and chill time doing other projects. 
• Not doing the art. I asked Saf if they wanted to help out with the art (I'd worked with them before on lycoris;lastwords and they were amazing) and I'm so glad they accepted. There's not a ton of assets required in chatsim games, but just having that off of my plate let me focus on tightening up the game. And, because we had someone only on art and the implementation of that art in game, it made all those assets pretty cohesive and work well together. No clashing issues. Yay! (Well. We did have someone else (Destini) do that bad end cg. But that was just fucking funny) 
• Having a chat system ready. By this point, I had my own renpy chat framework that was easy to adapt to this project. The majority of the time spent in bloomic dev was to get the chat to work (again, i had like, not a ton of experience) but in seekL that was done in no time. It was great. 

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The Story 

SeekL tells the story of the final days of a hacking server. You join, help out with their last hacks, and watch the server shut down. Along the way, you get a chance to get to know the server owner "Odxny", who is suffering from the effects of long-term isolation from others. The title, "seekL", is a play on the name of the database query language SQL (pronounced "sequel"). You can also read it as "seeking- L's", as in they are ruining a lot of people's lives. We use the name "seekL" for the endings as well: "seekLoss" (bad), "seekLife" (platonic), and "seekLove" (romantic). 

The main story was inspired by a few things. A lot of it was from my own experience over the years as I struggled with strong, sudden periods of isolation and what felt like an inability to do anything about it. Part of it had to do with, you know, how as you get older, it's harder to keep up those connections that once came so naturally. That sudden rush of realizing how alone you are is easily overwhelming. Mix that in with some pretty terrible things that can happen in life, and it can be hard to not let yourself slip into pure apathy about the world and yourself. Besides all that, some of the story was also inspired by people in tech I dated years ago, who were all sort of lonely and off on their own ships. 

When it came to the text, me and the other writer (Allie) pulled on those isolating/depressing periods we've both had when it came to Odxny's stuff, and channeled gremlin forum energy when it came to the server chat. Writing the server chats KILLED us so often (in a good way) because we just let ourselves be stupid and silly. It was genuinely a blast. There are so many fucking quotes that we love. I seriously struggle to pick a favorite. Allie helped cover a lot of ground in the call text and the starts/ends of days in chats, and I'm really grateful for that! Writing all of the game on my own would have been way too much if I wanted to Truly Vibe. If you notice any plot holes, please look away. We were simply so focused on The Vibe. 

Some people will likely be disappointed that this game isn't as romantic as bloomic, but we didn't really wanna do another bloomic. The slow beginning of a crush/connection was fun to explore this time around. 

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The Art

Saf did an incredible job here. They worked with us on every step to make sure we liked their ideas for Odxny's design, the server layout, colors, all of that. But, I also really just kinda let Saf do what they wanted most of the time. It's crazy to think about how if I had done the art, I'm sure it would have looked way different (not in a good or bad way. Just different). I like working with other artists lately for that reason -- they show me new ways to think about how assets can be done and put together. It's honestly a great learning experience! (Also, really appreciate their last minute add of emotes. They really made the game feel WAY better. )

If they end up doing a thread on how all the art came together, I'll link it in here for  you. 

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The Music / SFX

HI-T3C did an incredible job on the tracks -- we basically gave him the prompt "cringe hacker in love" and he absolutely RAN with it. I'm absolutely dogshit when it comes to composing music, so I always appreciate musical talent like this. It adds the shine to the game, ya know? Also, the theme song. He didn't have to go that hard, but he did. Destini also helped out with the verse lyrics on that, which made the song even better. Really appreciate both of them for helping out there. 

He also did a killer job on the SFX, and was incredibly patient with us as we playtested to figure out which sounds would work best or which ones needed to be tweaked. They all needed to be juuuuuuust right to make the player feel immersed, and that wasn't a difficult task for HI-T3C. 

(Just so it's clear, HI-T3C did not come up with the lyrics to TOXIC_RAP. That was all the VA. Legend. If you have no idea what I'm talking about, go check out the BONUS room when you clear all three endings. Or, if ur lazy, it's in the game/audio/music folder. )

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The VA

Mike has never disappointed me. We did the table read one day of all the voiced lines, and within 24 hours he had all the lines in my inbox. I don't  understand how he does it. I'm so glad he keeps agreeing to do my projects. Bless u. 

His voice is, as always, killer. I expect some people will play this game just to hear him again. Deserved!! He did a great job playing our depressed, isolated programmer. I like too how his read here is really different from his read of Xyx -- shows his range! 

I honestly don't have a lot to put in this section because the VA work was just that easy. You're amazing, Mike! That toxic_rap... legendary. 

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The Programming 

SeekL is split into 3 programming chunks: 

• the voice calls, 
• the chat functionality, 
  
• and the seekL programming minigame. 

Voice Calls 

This was mostly just basic renpy programming. These were the quickest to throw together. 

Chat Functionality 

Based on my chat framework for renpy, I adapted it to what I needed it to do and it shipped off easily. The most major change I made was adding play/pause functionality. I did this by toggling the afm feature on and off basically. I'll likely add this to the framework, since it's sort of silly it didn't already have it. 

SeekL Programming Minigame

Ohhhhh you. SeekL. If I have one regret in this jam (I don't really have any to be clear) it would be that I didn't stop vibing a little bit to focus on the puzzles a bit more. Because I put them off for so long, they don't tie super well together and (I think) feel taped up. But I'm also immediately over it after having that thought bc I enjoyed The Vibe. 

Beyond the puzzles themselves, the language was easy...at first. I made a function that would read-in a string and parse it out in very basic pseudo-SQL. It went through a few iterations that aren't worth talking about, and probably could use a few more, but it worked! Yay! No need to tweak anything about it, right? 

WRONG IDIOT

ENTER THE QA TESTERS WHO HAVE NEVER PROGRAMMED BEFORE

If you have programmed even once in your life, you have a true advantage in this game over those who never have. Watching people who've never programmed before play the game early on gave me a lot of insight into what we needed to change about the language and the errors that were output to make sure all players could: 

1. still have fun with some frustrating coding sections, and 
2. get through the game without the guide if they so chose. 

This meant sacrificing difficulty, which was a bummer! It's part of the reason why I got so blase about the puzzles too, I think. I really wanted to make something like this sql murder mystery, but it would have been nearly impossible to teach inexperienced players all that and have them still enjoy it. So, it all got dumbed down, but I think that was the right choice. I do itch to make a bigger SQL-y game later though. At least I can still call this game my ploy to teach gamers some SQL. 

For those who really like the coding minigame and want more things like that, I really love the game 7 Billion Humans. This is notably harder tho than this, of course. But there's a ton of programming games out there! 

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The QA 

We did touch on QA already a bit, but let's just talk a bit more. QA was so, so critical to this game. They had great input for what needed to happen in the UI to make it clear what was expected in the programming minigames, ideas that I wouldn't have thought of at all. As always, I think QA gets mega-underappreciated a lot of the time, and I want them to know I owe them my life. This game would not have been half as good or fun to play if they hadn't agreed to help out. Thank u QA army mwah mwah 

Some interesting things that changed bc of QA testing off the top of my head: 

• removal of schemas in the table names (didn't make sense, wasn't relevant) 
• less realistic table set ups (was confusing for those who didn't work with data) 
• the addition of a table list + info tab 
• clickable history + clickable example code in chat 
• re-haul of the tutorial to be based on a table about the characters instead of a table about zoo animals 
• longer explanations of how the code works 
• play/pause 

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Final Thoughts

This was fun! I joined on a whim when I saw the jam appear, and I don't regret it. I still think I prefer weekend jams and probably won't do another 2-month jam for a while (it's just a huuuuge commitment), but I really am glad we participated. It gave us from a break from the long dev process of Adonia (my fault, you'll hear all about that in the devlog whenever it finally comes out) and some laughs along the way. 

If you'd like to send money our way, I encourage you to donate that money instead to the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. Services like that are important for people who are struggling, like Odxny. If you can't afford a donation but would like to do something, try to reach out to someone in your life you might not have spoken to in a while. They'd probably really appreciate it. 

There will be no updates to seekL unless someone finds a truly game-crashing, game-breaking bug. Pls do not interpret that as  a challenge. Pls. Pls do not break this. 

HAPPY HACKING!

PS - if u come for me w stuff like "stupid robo, that's not what hacking means" i will wag my finger at you. dont you know i've always been stupid 

PPS - ArnoldC is real