Hello, my name is Andrew, and in this devlog I’m going to breakdown the development process of my Game Off 2025 submission called “Holy Signal” and what I would have done differently.

WARNING: SPOILERS FOR THE ENTIRETY OF HOLY SIGNAL!

Week 1

Once the theme of Waves was announced, I already had (gameplay-wise) an idea of what I wanted to do. Just a couple of days before the start of the game jam, I saw a video by Crooked Smile Studios about making an interaction system, similar to one in the Amnesia games. That’s when I decided to make my submission a horror game with this interaction system.

An idea for the story was originally somewhat different from the finished product. You were meant to be an antenna tower operator during a war. Your job was to catch incoming signals and amplify them to basically send them forward. Overall the game was supposed to be less linear than the final version. While doing this, you would be hunted by a decaying corpse of a soldier, who was killed, because you forwarded a signal revealing his position. After a lot of thought, I decided that this project couldn’t be finished in a month, so I morphed it into the story you know now.

The rest of the week, I spent polishing the interaction system and testing its capabilities, as it was the main focus of the gameplay. Just normal preparation stuff so as not to get sidetracked later in the project. Giving the gameplay and the story a solid frame.

Week 2

At the start of the second week, I realized that I should probably start making some models. I primarily use Blockbench, as it’s far simpler than Blender, and with its newest update, you can finally add an armature to your model, so there is really no reason for me to learn a whole new software for 3D modeling right now. Also, I am in love with scary low-poly-looking games, so it was an obvious choice.

For the theme of the models, I went with an old industrial aesthetic, as I think it conveys the feeling of the dark future that Holy Signal is based on. Funny thing is that almost a third of the models I made aren’t in the final product, as I was too lazy to add them, unfortunately. So here is at least a mug I created:

Also as a goodie, here is the entire model of the “Ä̷̼̩́̔͘n̶͎̆g̴͍̐́̓e̶̖̬͑l̷̩̪̈́” that is at the end of the game:

So… let’s make the actual game now.

Week 3

Week 3… was a struggle. For half the time I had no idea what I wanted the level to be. Then I just added a square floor, four infinitely long walls, stairs, and another square floor and made the sky black… Well, that worked like a charm.

Then I started blocking out the tables, server racks, lights, and other models until it looked presentable enough for a game jam submission. Took a quick break from level design and looked at some shaders that I could stea—I mean, borrow. The best site I found for this is called GodotShaders, and they’ve got some really nice shaders. Very cool. I popped that sucker in, and I had low-poly PSX-like visuals.

After that I got straight to the control panels and how they would work. I put them together and created a Game Director node with a script that manages all of the events in the game. Simple solution to avoid game event mix calling. Then I spent 6 hours fixing a rotation bug on the switches at the second control panel. pain. And made the final panel to transmit the signal.

After all of that, I prepared a simple main menu and the beginning sequence. Finalizing the main scene with the jumpscare and the end credits. I used rcedit to give the executable an icon for the Windows version (which is the only version at this time) and exported it for release, baby. LET’S GO!

What would I change?

One of the biggest things I am disappointed in is the main menu. I knew I wanted a simple menu, but it really doesn’t complement the rest of the game very well.

The second disappointment is the performance of the game on lower-end hardware. When I tried to play this game on my laptop that has only a CPU (12th Gen Intel Core i7-1265U), it ran with stutters. Not that terrible of a stutter, but still stutters. I tried to fix this by lowering the quality of shadows, lowering physics ticks, and other stuff, but it still isn’t optimal. I pushed this as the 1.0.1 version and called it a day, as this is still just a game jam submission.

Conclusion

Thank you very much for reading this postmortem devlog about my first ever released game, and I hope you had fun playing it. I definitely plan on joining other game jams and creating games outside of said jams, so if you’ll be so kind, follow me for future updates. See ya!