Clef’s Quest was my entry to the 81st Godot WildJam with the Theme of Expedition. I also included one of the wildcards; A Capella (Make all sound effects with your mouth). I origionally wanted to make a Parappa the Rapper style game about a mimic in a dungeon trying to find other mimics by making the player mimic the noises of random objects, But after some time thinking on it, I didn’t think I’d have the experience to make something like that within a week, having it record and compare noises in some fashion seemed a little out of reach for a gamejam, especially since I’ve never dived that deep into sound before. So I pivoted and decided to turn the wildcard into the games main mechanic.
In Clef’s Quest, an evil witch has stolen all the sound effects from a typical RPG world, and it’s your mission to go and re-record all the sounds across the land. I was somewhat accidently heavily inspired by the Paper Mario games for the look and feel of this. I actually wanted to put a boss fight in the game at the end that’d use your recorded sounds in soem fashion but again, stretched for time, I couldn’t fit it in.
Despite that, I ended up doing pretty well in the round of voting afterwards, coming 1st place for Origionality, out of 164 entries.
Heck, 25th overall isn’t that bad either, and 6th for fun.
This was a great feeling for me, partway through the dev work I didn’t think the game was actually going to be decent in terms of content. how much fun can someone have by recording a small handfull of sound effects and having NPC’s say them back to them. But during the voting period, I saw so many wonderful comments by people praising the idea. It feels really good knowing that despite feeling like I’m not very good or deep sometimes, people do see the charm in my ideas. This is especially reassuring to me because it’s the second time I’ve entered the godot wild jam and it’s the second time I’ve come 1st for one of the catagories. It makes me feel like the first time wasn’t just a fluke.
Anyway, the game is short and I still think it’s lacking a bit of spice and depth, but I’m really happy that plenty of people enjoyed it.