Hi all!

You may know Caveware Digital / SCREAM CATALOGUE as hosts of the SCREAM horror game jam series, the most recent jam being SCREAM SEASON! On the 22nd of February (may be different for non-Australians???) we will host SCREAMWORLD. Before that however, we decided to enter Global Game Jam and make the cutest game we could, just to feel a different energy for a while.

The result? "the world is trash"

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How we came up with the concept

Before TWIT, we'd made a couple horror games (Fancy Seeing You Here, Ghost Dance) and cute horror-inspired games (SLIMEZONE, Soulless In Seattle). So after Ghost Dance and SCREAM SEASON, we felt like making a purely cute, wholesome experience. We also wanted to gain experience in simple 3D modelling. We felt our stories had become slightly samey, so we decided to remove the story element this time around.

When the theme was announced ("What Home Means To You"), we began thinking of ideas that would challenge the concept. The first idea was of a house which required cleaning up. The gameplay was more like an RTS, with you controlling a limited number of units, designating them to certain tasks. The gameplay was refined via many, many walks through the cemetery next to our jam site. I personally think it's great that we came up with such a lovely, cute game walking through such a morbid place.

Eventually we came up with the core of our game by thinking more out-of-the-box. We didn't need to have a limit on the number of units being shot, and we certainly didn't need to push the player around with a real challenge. We could make a purely relaxing game and that would be okay. While we were worried with the game not being "gamey" enough, we grew confidence as development continued.

The name of the game began as TRASHWORLD, but it was very similar to our upcoming jam. So we went with The World Is Trash.

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What tools we used

For this jam we decided to use somewhat buggy beta versions of Godot 3.1 and Blender 2.8, simply because they have better glTF importing / exporting, especially when it comes to animations.

We didn't use glTF animations at all for this jam.

Perhaps it was a waste of time and we would have been better off just using stable versions of these tools, but it's fun being on the bleeding edge sometimes. The lesson learned here is that, in game jams, perhaps you're better off sticking to the stable tools. But we got to use some interesting new features, notably typing in GDScript. Also, we're very prepared for when these tools come out of beta!

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What comes next

Currently we are not confirming that a post-jam version of TWIT will ever be released, but we are playing around with a few concept! The jam version of TWIT only has one level and no story, and a potential plan would be to have many levels and a loose story. We believe that adding more collectibles, power-ups, and a very slight challenge to the game would improve it drastically. We are considering how we can improve performance of the game engine and get more animations into the game.

We would also like to add at least one explosion into the game because heck yeah explosions.

We will maintain the "Mars facts" billboards because, although they're not funny, maybe you'll learn something :^)

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Who we are

Ryan Liddle is the writer, sound artist, and primary model designer of "the world is trash".
Josef Frank is the scripter and primary level designer of "the world is trash". You can find him on Mastodon, Twitter, and can donate to him on Ko-fi.