A red-eyed boar named Treachero is saying "The King has heard of the invasion planned by our true liege, the Scarlet Duke" to to evil-looking man in a hood holding a sword. The man responds "Has he, now"? through a button prompt.

Built to Scale!

Built to Scale! is the result of my participation in the GMTK Game Jam 2024 — the second game jam I took part in, and (inadvertently) the first game jam I did solo! Originally, me and three other people were going to work on this game, but everyone else had to bow out at the last minute. By that time I was already so seized with the theme of the jam, ‘Built to Scale,’ that I decided to plow ahead by myself — and I’m very glad I did!

Built to Scale! is a collection of three minigames about a treacherous vizier, deliberately building a shoddy wall meant to be scaled by the forces of their true liege. The first part is a short, choice-driven, semi-randomized visual novel where the player decides which materials to build the wall with, needing to balance the acquisition of sufficient poor-quality materials to make the invasion go smoothly against the King’s growing mistrust. Next, the actual construction begins, where the player must meet various randomly-selected criteria as decreed by the King. Finally, when the invasion begins, the player shifts to control the armies of the invader, with the goal of tearing their wall down as quickly as possible, using their available unit types to achieve victory with minimum casualties.

Being a project that drastically changed in team size at the eleventh hour, I have relied heavily on third-party assets to meet the jam’s deadline. The full accreditation list can be found on the game’s page, but I would like to highlight insbilla’s JSON Dialogue System and LYASeeK’s MiniFolks spritepacks as especially integral to the game’s final feel.

You can play Built to Scale! here.

Game Statistics

  • Release: 20-08-2024

  • Engine: Godot

  • Project Type: Solo

  • Commercial: No

  • Hosting Site: itch.io

The player is storming the wall they have built with the Scarlet Duke's invading army, selecting which tiles to send their units against and watching them go.

  • Complete a game jam with an unique spin on the theme

  • Learn to adjust scope to sudden shifts in available manhours on the fly

  • Create a coherent selection of minigames tied together by theme and characters

  • Practice narrative writing and characterization through dialogue

Design Goals

Project Trivia

  • This game was originally meant to be much larger in scope, with you needing to ‘reinforce’ different sections of walls over a multi-day siege, with the King’s trust dwindling and his demands strengthening as they days passed. This sadly had to be cut for scope.

  • My job was originally to handle the coding side of things. I wrote placeholder dialogue as I went, since that generally helps me feel out the shape of a game better than dummy text. I’m glad I did, because that’s what made it into the final game when it became a solo project! Honestly, it’s some of my favourite dialogue I’ve written in a game.

  • The backend of this one is… interesting. I jury-rigged a dialogue manager system that wasn’t meant to handle branching conditional paths to accept those anyway by manually counting the amount of times the player has clicked on a dialogue option and then inserting a match statement at the appropriate times. I’m a little surprised my computer didn’t spontaneously develop sentience to strangle me for that. It’d have been justified, honestly. But hey, it’s a game jam — if it works, it works, right?