Overview

Massaquerade was our third game jam entry, made for the Winter MelonJam 2025. The theme was "Mask". Which we took quite literally. You're a hitman for hire at a masquerade ball, masked, and were left with a single hint on your invitation letter: "Traitor". You have to go around talking to guests, gathering clues, and eventually identify and eliminate your target.

The Dialogue System

One of the biggest motivations for making this game was to learn something new. For game jams, they're usually a great opportunity to experiment and try out new things without any pressure. In this case, we wanted to try our hand at a more narrative focused game and see how we would build a dialogue system.

The biggest technical challenge on this one was dialogue for sure. Not only did it take WAY WAY longer to write than we expected, but it was also just quite hard to write a bunch of branching dialogue in a way that was easy to manage and iterate on. We built a JSON-based dialogue system where you could define flags to set, flags to check, which node to go to next, and a variety of other options. This ended up being really powerful and flexible, but it was a real pain to write and test.

That said, I'm proud of the system we built. It's pretty flexible and it could definitely be used again if it was cleaned up and had some general improvements.

Conclusive Thoughts

Out of 200 submissions we placed 36th overall, with our highest individual category being Graphics at 17th. Gameplay came in at 39th. We weren't completely happy with the final game. Mostly because there was so much that we felt like we weren't able to do. While Solar Charged was a learning experience, Forgotten Paths felt like a complete game that we were proud of. To us, Massaquerade felt more like it was more similar to Solar Charged and landed in that learning experience category rather than the complete game category. Still, it was a fun experience and we learned a lot from it.

Once again, I am asking YOU!! to go play the game and check it out. Maybe you'll have a good time. Maybe you'll be a part of the large chunk of people who decided to kill The Frog because they hated him. There is only one way to find out...

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