Like many teams participating inThe Case of the Thinky Game Jam, the Sleeping Castle team was inspired by Return of the Obra Dinn, Case of the Golden Idol, and Riley & Rochelle – but we also wanted to draw on our experience designing and DMing D&D campaigns to set something in more of a fairytale world, one where everybody lived! (Well, mostly) 

Our goal for the game jam was to have fun and simply to push our idea forward. We had never even touched Godot before the start of the Jam, but our programmer Henry put in many late nights to learn it, and did a fantastic job of templating scenes to make it easy to add new clues and puzzles. 

We thought the mechanics of puzzles like this lent themselves well to the kind of color/symbol heraldry of a fantasy court. The use of “Symbols” as a clue type evolved out of that, and as an easy way to program more complex puzzles like the horse stalls and the guard schedule puzzles. We built the story around the puzzles that Andy created, starting with what we wanted the player to figure out, then thinking of how to reveal information to the player. Our writer Pete developed intriguing hooks that consistently brought the story more depth, and went back and forth with Andy to build connections between the puzzles and characters. 

We had basic versions of the puzzles drafted (in Powerpoint) going into the jam, but in tweaking them we may have inadvertently made some of them too difficult, too fast, instead of giving the player time to learn the mechanics. 

We all felt inspired to make something worthy of the amazing music and sfx our composer, Petriform, created. He had a number of ideas for sound effects that gave the game a more tactile, immersive feel. 

We didn’t have an artist, so Andy learned how to use Adobe Illustrator to create our art assets by extensively editing stock images. We learned to say “good enough” and “done” are better than “perfect.” 

At the close of the jam, we had all of the story and asset views working, but the “Symbol” clues were still showing up as words, and we didn’t have all the puzzles visible due to a bug with drag and drop. Our first major update fixed both of these issues, as well as adding the “final door” puzzle, giving the game an ending. Our second major update fixed the scaling issues, added new sound effects, added “sorting” to clues, and updated a few of the art assets to be more visible. Our third major update added a Mac version and a few other quality of life improvements. 

We spent 17+ days eating-drinking-not-really-sleeping the Sleeping Castle, and we loved every second of it. We definitely feel like we got the true Game Jam experience, and we learned so much! 

We’re incredibly proud of what we made, both for the Jam and afterwards, and we intend to keep gathering feedback as we regroup before refining and refactoring our prototype! 

Next Iteration, we plan to work on:

• Giving the player an easily-solvable puzzle right away (and generally staggering puzzles better)
• Breaking out the residents onto their own pages
  • Adding “Role” and “Loyalty” to things you have to figure out! 
• Introducing Caroline and her party via the Book
• Adding LeRoy the bird friend as a guide/hint bank
• All new custom art
• Additional sound effects and cues
• Inside the Castle: Royal Chambers, Kitchen, Prison, Library, Apothecary, and more! 
• Why is the Prince sick? Why is the window broken? Why is everyone sleeping? 
  • Follow us to find out! 

https://www.sleepingcastle.com/