My Life is Yours - Post Mortem & Reflections
The theme of the Global Game Jam that year was the Ouroboros symbol. Pretty early on our team settled upon wanting to do something with rebirth – specifically something with two characters, where the way one character died affected the other. After talking for a while, we settled upon a cool idea – what if the way the character died changed the world of the other character? What if one existed in an overworld, and the other an underworld? Orpheus and Eurydice? Brilliant.
So we split up into tasks, everyone working on various things. My personal job was to start designing levels that used this mechanic, which I attempted to get to immediately.
But there I was, staring at the board, and the problems just seem to keep mounting. If someone dies in fire and the other characters world becomes infernal as a result, doesn’t that make it likely that that character will also die in fire? How will the player know what layout they are creating before taking the plunge – do they choose when they die? What does the other player do when they are dead? If all the fatal elements show up in all the worlds (which they would have to in order to make this work) what’s the point of having the worlds shift at all?
Frustrated and losing all faith in my ability to design levels, I asked the rest of the team to come up and try their hand at it. Five minutes later, we were brainstorming a new core mechanic.
The biggest lesson of My Life Is Yours, I think, is that you can’t be afraid to scrap something that isn’t working, no matter how much effort you have put into it. Even after the change in the core mechanic, we held onto many extraneous elements from the original – split screen, two players – until the very last moment, because we had created them and, hey, they were cool. But every time, when we bit the bullet and got rid of them, it made the game better. The fact that we were willing to do make these changes, even if reluctantly, is what made the game successful in the end.
