The idea as I first wrote it

"A hex-tile based cards world building game about growing your kingdom in a treacherous fireland filled with ever-burning flames"

• Place buildings to grow your kingdom
• Use resources to buy cards from the deck
• Use construction cards and resources to create buildings
• There is a volcano that causes things to light up on fire
• Sacrifice resources to appease the gods and delay the volcano’s eruptions
• Extinguish the fire or let it spread to open new areas for construction
• Manage resources to maximize the kingdom’s growth
• Race against the clock! - Eventually the volcano will totally erupt and destroy everything
• Get the highest score possible, calculated from your decisions

What went right

Time

Even though I over scoped with a really ambitious concept for a jam, and after failing to finish two jams in a row, I decided that this time I'll make it to the finish line - so I rolled up my sleeves and worked almost non-stop, and I did!

Gameplay

Aside from allowing the player to delay the final eruption calamity event, I (astonishingly) managed to create everything I planned! A working game loop, with resource management, a card system, tile placement system, a fire spread mechanic and an end score!

Not-so-bad balance for a jam!

One of the biggest obstacles for the success of the game was balance. Fortunately, I had an ace up my sleeve - a friend who probably loves Civ more than any other game, and he helped a lot (as much as he could with the time constraints). Without this much needed guidance, especially since I was already exhausted from all the work, the game might have ended up too unbalanced to be somewhat fun.

Art

I chose a great palette and tile size, which streamlined the process of drawing the tiles. I used techniques I'm comfortable with, such as offsetting tiles to give the illusion of depth, using a CRT shader to 'pop out' the colors and drawing cute little buildings! I used nine-patch textures to create pixel art panels for the UI, and added juicy animations for the tiles with Tweens. It all worked out pretty great!

Music

Paul wrote:

I quickly found a vibey and fitting sound palette by researching Roman Empire instruments and running them through a bitcrushyy, retro effect chain. The soundtrack then evolved naturally from a calm beginning to a more epic ending part.

Positive Reception

We clearly did something right, because the game was featured on Itch's front page and YouTube channel, showcased by YouTubers and on Rock Paper Shotgun - and players were enjoying it a lot! And It got tons of positive comments and great feedback too!

So far the game has reached 24K plays and counting 🤯

Small details that made a big difference

• My art and Paul’s Music combined really well - this is why I love collaborating!
• Day and Night cycle - this added a lot of character and liveliness to the game and contributed to the feeling that you actually progress in time (towards your city's inevitable doom, that is).
• Historical Theme - it was fun to research a bit of the Roman Empire's history in order to create something that is based on real people and real events and it made for a pretty straight-forward art direction.

What went wrong

Tutorialization

I often screw this part up in game jams, sometimes knowingly, due to lack of time or poor prioritization!

• Many players did not understand that fires can be extinguished by clicking on them. Therefore they became extremely frustrated and thought the game was pointless. Can't blame them - that's on me for not explaining in-game.
• Fires can be allowed to spread in order to gather more faith.
• Fires don't light up at night and are easy to miss.
• Meadow and forest cards don't generate resources, they only cost resources to build.
• Meadow and forest cards aren't very useful and are very expansive to build, and players placed them anyway, wasting valuable resources in the process...

I remedied all those issues in the upcoming post jam update.

Music

Paul Wrote:

Initially, we planned for multiple music layers to dynamically trigger and fade with the game progression. However, once it became clear that the gameplay always lasted a fixed duration until the volcano eruption, we opted for a single, fixed musical buildup instead. This saved us implementation time.

Unfortunately, an unforeseen HTML5 bug prevented the music from pausing in the pause menu. This caused the track to 'run out' just when the game needed the most epic energy. In a last-minute effort, we tried rendering a longer version, but we couldn’t implement it in time.

Memory Leak

When you are tired... Don't forget to delete particle effects! This caused the game to run out of memory on HTML5 and to crash / freeze. I already fixed that.

Furthermore, the long soundtrack we used causes stutter on HTML5 for some devices, especially laptops - this is something I’m currently working on fixing.

Fortuna (free cards window) disrupts the flow of the game

Getting free cards is great, but players were frustrated with the handout screen disrupting the flow of the game every morning, and that they had to interact with it at the moment it opens up or lose their free cards.

I remedied that in the upcoming update by allow the player to choose when to open the free cards window, and the ability to reroll cards, too!

Early game needs less RNG

Players were often frustrated with the starting hand that is pretty random and can make your early to mid game a lot slower, which resulted in players abusing the restart key in order to get a preferred hand!

End game needs improvement

The ending felt abrupt and unfair to some players and the 'Game Over' text was confusing, as it indicated that the player lost the game, and that if they played differently, maybe they could've won - but there's no winning in this game, there's only playing for the highest score possible before Vesuvius erupts and destroys everything!

Furthermore, some players were sad to see their city being destroyed - even though that’s the premise of the game.

Final Thoughts

The future of Before the Ash

We're extremely proud of this creation, and I'm considering developing Before the Ash into a full game that will be released on Steam. The difficulty in that right now is that the game needs more depth in order to transition from a jam game into a fully fledged game.

Some ideas for possible additions to the game are:

• Deck building and meta progression
• New types of cards as such ‘Blessings of the Gods’ cards
• More stuff to build
• Units, maybe
• More things to do with resources
• Mission / level select
• More lore and ancient history references
• More types of disasters (floods, plagues, etc).

TLDR: There's a lot of thinking to be done.

The next update

For now, I'm working on a post-jam update that adds:

• Some tutorialization - fires now have a prompt to extinguish them at first
• Improved UI
• Bug fixes
• New buildings
• New currency: gold
• Less intrusive Fortuna - Fortuna will no longer stop the flow. You decide when to open the window, and you can reroll once for free then pay faith to reroll
• Upgrading buildings
• Reclaiming charred lands will increase the score
• Meadow/Forests will cost a lot less to build
• Notification system - so you know what burned out, and when free cards are available
• Cards that don't generate have a "Does not generate" text
• New maps
• And more!

Thanks!

Thanks to the Godot Wild Jam organizers and participants, to my local Godot community who helped with playtesting and to everyone who helped test and shape the game! And thanks Paul for making awesome Music and SFX for the game!

And thank you for reading and for playing 🙂

Let me know if you have any any feedback or suggestions for the game. It helps more than you can imagine!

You can play Before the Ash in your browser for free!