I've come up with a game idea, settled on the art style, and put together the first visual blockout of the UI. 

The first location blockout was done, inspired by the Backrooms, and I started working on the lighting and post-processing. Here's what it looked like at the time.

Back then, I thought it looked relatively decent for the style I was going for.

Looking back at it now, though, this shit looks worse than actual shit. Good thing I ditched the old visuals and moved away from the heavy Backrooms aesthetic. 

This is where I made the first lobby blockout and added a little dialogue with what was supposed to be the trader at the time. 

Around this point, I decided to change both the game's visual style and its gameplay.
I went from a solo Backrooms VHS horror game to a co-op quota horror game for up to 3 players, which is what the game is today.
At this stage, the game was still P2P, but I soon moved the project to a VPS server to improve the gameplay experience and give myself more freedom to experiment with and diversify the gameplay. 

I finished the game lobby and built a separate lobby for turning in the quota. I also recolored the floor prefabs to fit the new art style, added transitions between floors, and implemented loot spawning.

But even with all that, the game still played like shit, and I was running out of time.

The build was playable, and you could get from A to B, but the gameplay still felt awful, and the visuals weren't exactly great either...

I released the game, left it up for about a day, and then hid it. Around three people played it during that time. Hopefully, none of them uninstalled s&box because of it. 

This is roughly where the game jam ended. You guys already know the results anyway.
Halo legend! He made a really cool game, so let's congratulate him on the win🎉
 

At some point, I started wondering: what if I added a bit of stylization to the pixel art?

So I added outlines, and honestly, it ended up looking way better than before. If you're not a fan of the outlines, you can simply turn them off in the game settings. 
 

A bit off-topic, but this might save someone a lot of time.

Server-side code doesn't run in the editor, only on a Dedicated Server. However, you can't connect to that server through New Instance because you'll get a [GameMismatch Code 1000] error.

To get around this, add +net_allow_local 1 to the server's launch arguments. After that, you'll be able to connect to your server from virtual instances of s&box. 

I’ve spent around 400 hours on this project, and I don’t regret changing the genre and art style when I did. I think it was the right call.
There’s still plenty of room to polish the game and make it even better, but honestly, I’m getting tired and would really like to see how players react to it.
Was it all worth it? Is it even worth continuing development? What if nobody actually cares about this game?


I guess it's time to find out.