Phase 7: Putting it together
So the jam ends tonight and lots of entries are rolling in. Buckle up, this is going to be a long post. Anyway, it’s unlikely that anything I say here is going to be able to apply to the others in this year’s jam. That said, I wanted to finish out the series of entries and it will be here going forward into future game jams as well. Before I begin, allow me to link the entire set of entries so someone following the link included in my game can start at the beginning.
Looking Back
http://blog.dxlogan.com/2026-shadowdark-game-jam-an-8-bit-journey/
http://blog.dxlogan.com/2026-shadowdark-game-jam-preparing-to-act/
http://blog.dxlogan.com/2026-shadowdark-game-jam-gathering-ideas/
http://blog.dxlogan.com/2026-shadowdark-game-jam-narrowing-it-down/
http://blog.dxlogan.com/2026-shadowdark-game-jam-planning/
http://blog.dxlogan.com/2026-shadowdark-game-jam-where-i-fight-my-nature/
What Must Be
I have to include something at the start to show what inspired the game. With space at a premium, this will be an image of the three games and a short blurb. To allow those interested to learn more, I will put a link to this post. Last year, I didn’t blog the process and instead put an author’s note on my website. Either way, it is there if people are curious and out of the way if not. Best of all, it takes minimal space.
Next, Shadowdark needs the third party license info posted somewhere. In this case, I am adding it to the final page that represents a back cover. In theory, it would be one of the first things someone saw if they picked up a physical book, so it makes sense.
The only other requirement is obeying the itch.io terms of service. No issues there, so let’s get to the meat and potatoes.
What to Drop or Change
I’m not going to outline everything here. Instead, I am going to give you two examples. You’ll recall I intended to drop Ikari as a meaningful word. I just didn’t have a place for it. When I fleshed out the NPCs, I realized the ancient priest is all alone in the world, left holding up the last will of a dead god. If anyone has the right to be angry, it’s him. So he was named Ikari.
I was originally going to add 2 pages of items and spells, but after I was all done writing and really looking over what elements were going to add the most value (those 3 judge criteria), I realized I could drop a number of items and even the spells without losing anything. I kept one spell that I considered valuable even if it wasn’t being actively used in the game. A far better use of space was dedicating it to other things. A ‘high score’ tracker was able to do four functions at once.
It (as the name suggests) indicated the scoring being important and how to handle scoring in the game. The second and most obvious function was vibe. Every instruction manual for the NES includes something about how points are scored! Third was in giving an immediate call-out to an NPC later in the book having a ridiculously low score in the negatives. This creates a bit of storytelling without needing any extra space or writing. Lastly, I used the scores themselves as my credits section so there wasn’t a need to dedicate any space elsewhere to that. I think this is an absolutely top-tier use of my limited space.
Art when it matters
I already explained why art can be useful. Even so, art is a space-eater if you want it to be readable on the page. 8-bit art is a little simpler, so that helps. Still, if a picture normally paints a thousand words, we’re aiming for a double word count out of them. My cover, as a first example, tells you all sorts of things. It gives the name of the game. That’s more than they realize on first opening it. Ab-Ba’s Last Breath.
The title is also the name of the special treasure. Stack it as well with the later puzzle and having the title there reinforces just how central things are and adds double meaning to what is going on. The last of Ab-ba’s power is waning. The last of her life-breath in the location. The cover gives some information about what to find inside, the game system, who wrote it, and one more thing. A beautiful image.
That image evokes ideas about what players will find inside. It tells you the nature of the jungle. It gives vibes. I dedicated an entire page to about a dozen words, but I made the art speak volumes.
Similarly, when I created the 8-bit NPCs, I used the iconography of 8-bit game fight bars to place key information. I was going to use the space to list their stats anyway, so I was able to use art and not lose a single bit of writing space!
One last example here. Monsters can be tough in Shadowdark. Most only have one or two sentences about them and a few stats to go off of. Even the smallest bit of art can go a long way to evoking a deeper imagination on what you are dealing with. Obviously I couldn’t include an image of every monster, but by picking the ones most likely to have unique visual forms, I was putting paragraphs worth of information into the booklet.
Selecting Fonts that Matter
Shadowdark uses Montserrat, IM Fell, and JSL Ancient. These are an easy way to default your font visuals back to the core book. I could have also used pixel-based fonts or jungle-themed fonts. Because I wanted this booklet to be colorful and represent what you expect to see in a NES instructional pamphlet, I wasn’t going to be able to load it down the the simplistic black and white aesthetic from Shadowdark.
This prompts me to choose those 3 fonts as well. If I used anything else, it would have been very limited. The obvious benefit here is that even though the colors are bright, there’s a through-line back to the Shadowdark feel. There’s one additional benefit. Montserrat has a metric ton of variation in font visuals. This lets you really control how the final product looks and how you call out the elements you want to pop or slip into the background.
Laying into Layout
Oh good lord. I could talk for days here. I’m not an expert though. If I succeed, it is because other more skilled individuals have given me tips along the way. Still, let me just point a few things out here.
One: Don’t worry about tinkering with the layout and formatting until you have the majority of things written. I made this mistake last year and it really took me forever to fix the problems it caused. Every time I would change something on one page, it would affect something three pages later.
Two: That brings me to the next point. Don’t link all of you written info from one page to the next more than two pages together. Preferably only pages facing one another. If you later decide to move a page elsewhere, it won’t be nearly as hard to deal with editing. It won’t stretch either. I don’t care if the information is 5 pages long, trust me. You can cut those extra sentences into another section later if you have to.
Three: Don’t be afraid to play around, especially early on. See how art looks in different spots. Adjust the lead on paragraphs to see what you like, decide if you might prefer the text median to be a little larger or maybe favor an uneven split so the box to one side or the other has more weight. As long as you maintain the same setup and position across all pages, it is fine. Master pages exist.
Making Words Pull Their Weight
Remember the score tracker I mentioned? That is a prime example of making every word matter. Any time you can make a word or sentence pull extra weight, you win. I had to name the NPCs, so each has a name with meaning. Litig is a reference to Nintendo and their scorched earth litigiousness. Mac Duck is a reference to two of the included games. McDuck from DuckTales and Mac of the Joe and Mac. Ikari I already explained.
I do this a lot through the work. There are probably over 100 small references or choices made that play double duty. Calling the giant monster body a ‘Dragon-eater’ does a lot of heavy lifting. I could have called it a Kaiju. Maybe a Tarrasque. Perhaps a Leviathan or Behemoth. What that means and how you interpret it will vary a lot though. I don’t picture this sort of size with a Tarrasque. Dragon-eater tells you everything. A dragon is huge and this thing fits them in it’s mouth. Boom, scale immediately locked in.
Monsters are all about slimming the word count down. You can cut away a lot of fat. Any monster that’s book standard doesn’t need stats included. It can just be a page reference. Modified monsters can be the original page number with the modified stats noted below. My Flaming Skeletons for example. This saves a ton of space.
Don’t type Dexterity when DEX can suffice. Can you get away with just a D? Depends on the situation. You do want every word to be the same across the board and all stat abbreviations to match as well.
Find every ‘very <something>’ and replace it. Almost every time you will use less characters and have a more powerful word. The word ‘that’ often does the same thing. Heck, there are words in this blog I could cut out if I was doing a full edit rather than flow of consciousness. Be smart with your words.
Changing Elements
Once you’re in the thick of it, changing things is inevitable. If you grip too tightly to an idea, you’ll never let the cool changes happen. If I clung to my page counts on monsters, I would have had 2 pages of semi-useful items and spells, but lost several theme-enhancing monsters that can easily be plugged into any campaign. Since usage is one of the judging criteria, the monsters were worth more real estate than the a few situational weapons or lack-luster spells. The only items that made the cut were setting-vital and only one spell made it as a enticement for the back page. I also decided to add boons back there for good measure because it helps with the draw and offers some in-setting incentives.
Reworking is Common
Late in the process, you are going to find things you want to change. Elements didn’t look right. That art is really sitting doing something weird to a stat block. Does it make sense for this page to be here instead of there?
It happens. This is why I told you not to interlink too many pages. On the next to last day, I was able to fully relocate 4 pages without affecting any other page and greatly improving the continuity of the layout.
Originally I had the procedural map elements on 3 pages. I then had my monster pages. This was then followed by my big map and key section. As I was reading over the PDF from a player/GM perspective, I realized I didn’t like it. I had a bunch of map-ish stuff, monsters for every area, then suddenly another map.
I had two choices. I could put the monsters for an area directly after the map(or generators) for that area. Alternatively, I could put all of the maps together, then all of the monsters together. Since there was some unavoidable page bleed in monster sections, I went with the latter. Thus, all of my maps are together and you can flip towards the end (or follow hyperlinks) to get there when needed.
Sneaking in More
Once everything is written and largely in place, skim over the entire thing. I went through and realized I could add a few extra reference to NES games in general or specifically my 3 inspirations. The Mac Duck mentioned above was one of those that came late in the process. I was originally calling him Jervy Duck. I was sitting there deciding if I wanted to be a little more on the nose and call him Jervy McDuck when the current name hit me like a truck.
Whatever theme future years hold, this is a lovely trick to up your engagement with the theme and inspirations. People think smartly written books come from writers who know everything from the moment they put pen to paper. The truth is that most writers realize they can always edit. It’s easy to slip in a vital clue on page 10 that matters on page 150 for your murder mystery. The reader can look back and think of how clever you were to hide it in plain sight, but you didn’t have to put it there in the first draft.
These jams are the same. The reviewers aren’t seeing all the iterations, they see the final project. It isn’t about being a savant or genius. It’s about being willing to keep looking back and finding things to improve.
Cleanup
That advice goes for cleanup too. Once you have everything in, it’s time to fix all the mistakes. Most programs have some useful tools built in. I use Affinity, so I will reference that. It has what is called a pre-flight to look for all the errors.
Don’t jump strait to that. Instead, start by using the basic find function. Consider all of your proper nouns. Search each, one at a time to make sure you listed them all the same. Don’t want to miss a capitalization on a proper guild or something.
Next, look at any unique word sets to verify they are identical. In my passes, I realized an artifact from an earlier draft was still in there. My ‘Flame and Darkness’ was listed as ‘Fire and Darkness’ in just one location. Sure it’s small, but you don’t want anything to pull someone out of the moment.
All statistics need checked. If you listed Dex on page one, dex on page three, and DEX on page 11, someone is going to notice and find it frustrating. Part of usability is consistency. This isn’t a nit-pick. If I am scanning a page, I need to have what I am seeking look the same every time. Otherwise it is going to lower usability for some people and be visually unrefined to boot.
Once I am satisfied with the spelling related stuff, I go through the pre-flight. It doesn’t always catch everything I expect (it missed a word this year), but it does let me further check for bleed or cleanup issues.
Posting on Time
I can’t say this enough: DONT WAIT TO POST IN THE 11TH HOUR! Oh my god. Every year. Every single game jam, people are posting their work with five minutes left. What if your clock is wrong? What if your computer shuts down unexpectedly? What if a file doesn’t come through the first time?
Don’t do this to yourself. Before you do a ton of formatting, art, cleanup, or whatever else, get a working game. As soon as it is in a usable state post it. I don’t know a single game jam that doesn’t let you continue to update until the deadline. Post a functional game, then refine it until the deadline. Reupload periodically as you make changes and improvements.
This way, if you get down to the wire and miss the window, the reviewers miss out on a few small changes rather than you not being able to enter at all. Don’t forget, the judging criteria isn’t about perfect layouts, exact spellings, god-tier layouts, etc. It’s about whatever each year/jam is laying out. This year, it is a functional game, inspired by 3 8-bit games and offering a sense of NES vibes. Everything else is icing. Get that cake turned in!
Conclusion
It’s been a wild ride this year. I’m super pleased with my entry. I do hope to make top 10 at least, but who knows. There’ve been some very solid entries already. Honestly, that’s best. Winning isn’t really meaningful if you only beat trash. Scoring low hurts worse when the people who won weren’t very good too.
I think I’ve grown a lot each time I enter this competition and I’ve gained more than I put in. I hope you’ve found my mad rantings on the topic interesting and/or useful. Perhaps you will join in next year as well.
If you’re someone reading the blog who doesn’t own Ab-Ba’s Last Breath, please go check it out. Also, if you’re interested in last year’s entry, you can find it here. I also did a paid expanded edition you can find here.
