Scream Forever 2025 Retrospective
During Scream Forever 2025, I worked with the Sparrow Arcade team to create a game called The Drowning Machine. We had a few team members who were new to game jams, so we tried to structure the jam in a way that let them learn in a more controlled way than the “drink from the firehose” approach to learning about jams that we had employed in the past. This was our first time attempting this in a jam, so we got to learn firsthand what did and didn’t work in practice.
We’ve entered multiple jams organized by the Scream Jam team in the past, and we’ve found that their weeklong format and less restrictive rules are a good fit for our schedules and approach.
We started the jam with a meeting of the full team on the day it was announced. The jam itself started early in the morning for many of us, so we waited until the end of the workday so that everybody could make it. At the meeting, we discussed different ideas that we could build that would fit the jam’s theme of “Over and over again.”
We ended up deciding to make a game based on an image of a scary warning sign that has circulated in various horror spaces online for years. We discussed potential ways of turning the idea into gameplay, and settled on making a 3D first person horror game. The game would be set on a dam, and based on the idea of the player needing to walk back and forth across the top of it to accomplish some arbitrary task.
We chose Godot to build it, since we’ve used it in the past for jams and found that it’s more approachable than Unity. The game itself is set in a 3D space that is built out of pre-existing assets (mostly from the Kenney pack) and 3D polygons that Godot includes by default. It’s a simple walking simulator that uses walking back and forth across the dam as a vehicle to deliver scares to the player. We planned to build the space, then reuse most of it and only swap out what we needed for scares when the player wasn’t looking.
The game performed best in the sound department, and that was due in large part to the idea of adding something for the player to get back to. We decided on an incomprehensible radio drama as a motivator for the player to cross the dam back to the guardhouse where they started to reset the game state. Each time the player returned to their starting point after completing their task, they would hear a new “chapter” of their audio drama. It was deliberately absurd and impossible to follow. The ridiculous comedic audio was contrasted with scares like a silhouette being visible in the guardhouse when the player was returning, only to find nobody inside when they opened the door.
We worked on the game right up until the submissions closed. We played and reviewed other jam submissions over the judging period, then received our results a week later. We scored very well overall, and even better in the sound category. Criticism of the game was minimal, mostly looking for the option to skip replaying parts of the game when the player died, and wishing that there had been more scares than the three that we were able to finish.
Overall I’m really happy with the result of this jam. I think we’ve clearly refined our work as a team, and it’s encouraging to have new members to contribute to the project. I think that we can take the things we learned from this jam to improve our process further and allow us to introduce new members of the team more easily.
