Huge thanks to everyone who played the game, watched it, rated it — and left any kind of feedback!

We decided to join the jam a bit late, so we had about 7–10 days to make everything.
Of course, the plans were big (as always), so we didn’t manage to do everything we wanted. Most of the rough edges come from that. In this post, I’ll try to share some thoughts, little details, and what could’ve been done better.

I made this game together with German — he handled the code, music, and UI.

The Game

Some people say that menus and splash screens aren’t really needed —
especially for jam games (I’ve heard that more than once). But I think the moment you launch the EXE, the “game experience” has already started. A good menu (if the game needs one) adds to the overall feel — makes it more complete. So I think that part matters too. German did a great job here — and honestly, not many people enjoy working on UI!

The Desert

Originally, the idea was to make navigation through the desert easier — if we had time to add some “landmarks” to help players understand where they are. Things like rocks, ruins, and other typical desert objects. German had a great idea during testing — to add a sound cue while searching for the steles. It really helped, since finding them was pretty frustrating at that stage. At first, for easier testing, the steles were placed much closer to the temple — but later I moved them farther away…

Also, if you look at the screenshot (the sphere is the player), you can see that if the player walks straight ahead from the start, the first thing they should find is the table with five slots for the medals.

Most likely, we should’ve placed the player a bit closer to that table — so it’d be more obvious that there’s something ahead. Basically, the player needed a clear starting point to get their bearings.

Medal search mechanic

Here’s how it works:

• Once you pick up a medal, its stele stops making sound.

• If you still hear the sound, it probably means you’re facing a different stele. (That’s also why it sometimes feels like the sound is leading you toward the temple.)

• After collecting all the medals, the sound leads you to the medal table.

What could’ve been improved:

• A stereo sound effect might have helped players understand which direction to go. And smoother volume transitions based on distance could make it clearer too. Combined with some decorative rocks in the desert, it would’ve made navigation easier and more intuitive.

• We also planned to add a HUD. When picking up medals, it would show how many you’ve collected so far. And when looking at the table — show the total number needed.

1. Collected two medals, but missed the table — so the player doesn’t know how many are needed.

2. The player has collected all the medals.

3. The player has seen the table and knows how many medals are needed — but has only found two so far.

Medal puzzle (cut content)

Originally, we wanted the player to place the medals into the slots manually — in the correct order. (Maybe even rotate them...) There’s actually some logic for that already written.

The medals had “angles” on them, and the table had dots showing the vertex and direction of the angle. This way, each medal “encoded” a letter. Maybe that’s already too complicated... (I don’t really have experience making puzzles.)

Also, there are tiny “signatures” hidden on the medals — from Godot, Herman, and yours truly (Anim86).

The Temple

We wanted to make a maze, but without proper content or details (which we also planned), it turned out kinda boring. I thought about adding paintings or something to look at — but again… that takes time. A lot of time. Not much else to say about it :) Except the ending also felt a bit rushed — but yeah… time again.

Graphics

This was my first time trying a PSX-style aesthetic. It’s not too hard, but you do need to find the right “approach.” Of course, this isn’t real retro-style rendering — it’s just visual. We don’t have the same limitations as old consoles, so there are shadows, lots of particles, and other modern things.

One interesting thing I learned while working on the visuals:

1. Because of texture warping, you have to split large geometry into smaller chunks.
   Otherwise, the distortion becomes really noticeable on big objects —
   and it stops looking like PSX.

And that actually made texturing and reusing textures much easier.

Overall, the game uses less than one 4K texture — just 6 small textures for the whole environment.

Old stele and modeling stages

2. Because of how vertices behave (they get snapped to whole-number coordinates, causing that classic “jitter”), you couldn’t just connect flat level parts directly. You had to either add some kind of base underneath or manually stitch the vertices —
   otherwise, you’d get gaps. (Sometimes you can spot them on the ceiling.)

3. When exporting models to Godot (a whole topic on its own — I still haven’t figured it out), you had to turn off LOD generation. Otherwise, Godot would “optimize” the mesh and remove extra vertices it thought weren’t needed.

4. Placing and assembling everything in Godot was also a bit of a pain —
   due to the not-so-great navigation, shaders, and how we set up our terrain.

• The terrain was generated in the editor (it wasn’t loaded at runtime — it was the start), and we had to place the steles directly on it. But the draw distance was really bad — sometimes the terrain would just disappear 😅

• I couldn’t figure out how to rotate or move objects using local coordinates which felt really weird — and super inconvenient.

• Also, shader-related visibility areas couldn’t be turned off, which made it really hard to assemble the temple from modular pieces.

About the textures

It’s funny how none of the streamers mentioned that this is exactly how textures ehaved on the PS One… Not like they’re schoolkids — they should remember that, right? And many of them seem to have plenty of experience with indie games. The image below is from a Habr article — I think they grabbed it from Wikipedia.

Overall, it was an interesting experience. I’m not really a fan of vertex jitter and texture warping — but I do like this kind of retro aesthetic in general.

P.S. Yep — Artifact is actually the Gamin logo :)

Originally written in 2024 — just keeping the spirit.
The original Russian version is here: Артефакт - немного изнутри