Game for Rayuela Jam 2025 - The update

We've finally published our proposal for the Rayuela de Arena Jam 2025. It took quite a bit of work, but there's nothing like finishing something on time.

Last year, we missed the call and didn't have time to create anything for the 2024 edition, but this year we marked the date on the calendar to make sure we could take part.

What we didn't count on was that this year we'd have multiple opportunities to showcase our other project, Choose Cthulhu Files, at various fairs and events. That took up a huge amount of time we had originally planned for designing our idea and later executing it and, in the end, we only had 12 days to work on it.

On May 18, we came back from Guadalindie and got straight to work on The Update. A very simple narrative story (the original idea was actually more complex, but we didn’t have time for more), where you have to face several moral dilemmas such as saving humanity from a failure in the neural operating system that controls the brain implants everyone installs to boost their abilities.

We thought the idea of a system failure was interesting, and we wanted to give it a double meaning in the game: the failure of the ASCENix system, and also the many failures of the social and cultural systems that appear in most of the endings.

Halfway through the jam, the organizers released an extra diversifier, encouraging teams to create an experience that lasts five minutes or less. Since we didn’t have time to do everything, we clung to that diversifier like a lifeline.

We didn’t incorporate the rest of the diversifiers, mostly due to the time crunch. We focused on finishing something that works and, why not, something that looked nice too.

The artistic side was handled by Yolanda (Iolanthe), mainly by selecting scenes and 3D assets that we turned into videos to use as backgrounds for the game screens, as well as picking the music and sounds to go along with the visual parts.

As for the story, we had the invaluable help of María Mangas Dévora, who advised us on aspects related to psychology and the functions of the human brain, to give the story and the consequences of each choice more depth and realism.

Finally, once the narrative was written, Oliver (Revil) acted as the "glue" that brought everything together and programmed the logic behind the game, so we could deliver the result you're now seeing.

We hope you enjoy this little experiment, and we’d love to hear your thoughts and suggestions. In the end, we make these things for you, the players, so any comment that helps us improve is more than welcome and incredibly valuable to us.