Heist - Post Mortem
play the game here
Pompous Trash Jam 2025
April 2025 I participated in the Pompous Trash Jam Almost a year after the release of my full game Journey to Monolith I was feeling the gamedev itch and was looking for a low-stakes game jam to get my feet wet again - and this one with its whimsy list of rules and optional modifiers was a perfect fit for the amount of time I was able to put into it!
My game ranked 14th Overall out of a modest 45 total entries.
Here was my process for designing and building the game. You can play the game here on my itch.io page. The game was built using Godot Engine
Theme
I'm used to the typical jam where there is an overarching "theme" that is given right when the jam starts. Instead, this one urges you to create ANY sort of "Pompous Trash" (whatever that means) with some optional surprise modifiers to help steer you in a certain direction (if you want). One of the surprise modifiers was "Curation" - with the direction to steal curate other's works and incorporate them into your game.
HEAVILY inspired by my recent obsession with the Lupin the Third franchise, I quickly settled on a game set inside an art gallery, where your character has to steal works of art to hang up and display.
Game Design
My focus for this game was to instill the same vibe as the Lupin the Third anime - a little goofy, but also kinda cool at the same time (like jazz). I also knew going into the jam that I was going to have a limited and somewhat unknown amount of time to work on it, so I didn't want to commit myself to something too big in scope. My mind immediately went to the likes of Mario Party and Warioware, with their simple, easy-to-pick-up minigames with rules and direction that could be quickly figured out by the player with minimal instruction. Each minigame would be a part of the full heist to get your next piece of art, with the number of stages and their danger/difficulty increasing the deeper you get into the game.
In order to create a little extra player agency (and encourage players to share their finished gallery afterwards) I let them choose at the beginning of each heist from an array of three different pieces of "art" (art in quotations because some of the options are screenshots from random cartoons, parody art, or pictures of animals that my three-year-old chose from google). Once these three are randomly pulled from the master array, they are also popped from it and will never be available again on this playthrough - even if you fail the heist!
Minigame 1: Lockpick
After getting the gallery put down, I designed the first minigame - a simple lockpicking exercise with three concentric circles and a rotating "target" on the outside. The idea is for the player to rotate each circle one after another using the left and right keys to match the rotation speed and direction of the target for X seconds, emulating the spinning of a combination lock as you attempt to "feel" it out and try to crack the safe. Due to the geometry of the hitboxes, the game becomes slightly more difficult as you work your way into the circles and they get smaller and smaller.
Overall, I'm happy with how this one came out, when you're tapping your keyboard trying to carefully match the speed of the target without going outside it and resetting the timer while the clock ticks down, it really feels like you're trying to crack the lock before getting caught.
Minigame 2: Sneak
Next up is a rhythm-inspired game where you have to time the press of either Left/A or Right/D as they slide across the bottom of the screen, as if your character is tip-toeing past a sleeping guard and you have to carefully place each step. Again, the focus on this one was simplicity with a dash of goofy.
If you press the key at the wrong time, your character trips and falls down, and a red "CAUGHT" pops up, forcing you to start over with a new heist. This same caught screen is used in all minigames, if you fail to pass before the time runs out, or if you don't follow instructions properly.
Minigame 3: Dodge the Lasers
As we get deeper into the heist, I wanted to add a little more "action" to both the situation your characters is in as well as the actual gameplay itself. The player's character is "running" to the left, past detection lasers that must be dodged by either jumping over them (hold up/W) or sliding across the ground (hold down/S). This one requires slightly better coordination to pass, but isn't too difficult.
As your art collection grows, the speed of these lasers coming by also increases in order to ramp up the difficulty slightly from heist to heist. This one took a little trial and error to get the jump just floaty enough to allow the player enough room to dodge the higher lasers, while not being too floaty where you hit the next one as you come down from a jump.
Minigame 4: Disguise
Ramping up the silliness on this one, your character wears one of those stereotypical "disguise" glasses with a funny nose and moustache - leaning in on the Lupin inspiration and his specialty in disguising himself in order to escape pursuit. The "crowd" behind him moves left and right at random intervals, and switching direction at random times, forcing the player to shuffle around and blend into the line of people behind him.
My wife laughed out loud when she saw me testing this one, and I knew I had the right vibe. There is a hitbox area in between the two groups of crowd, and a counter goes up every frame that the player character is colliding with it - once the counter gets to X value (where X increases each heist) the minigame is won. I put in some checks to make sure the crowd doesn't move off screen too far, and called it complete!
Minigame 5: Spotlight Dash
I knew that I wanted some sort of "run away" type part of the heists, and settled on this one where the player has full control over the cardinal movement of their character and has to run from one side of the screen to the other without being "spotted" by the circle-shaped spotlights flying up and down the path. Each circle is giving a random speed (within a reasonable range) when the scene is loaded, so you really had to be on your toes the whole time - just like a thief running away from the police.
Generative AI for Music
One thing I did experiment with during this jam was using and incorporating audio generated by AI - in this case I used Suno to create a little background track for the game. I wanted something similar to the tracks from Lupin the Third and another anime, Cowboy Bebop, that feature high-energy, jazzy tunes with a catchy, recognizable hook. My prompt to Suno was something like "high energy, energetic jazz song that would play during a heist movie" which generated a surprisingly decent tune. I did some minor tweaking to the prompt and had it try again, and it sounded great! It created a catchy hook like I wanted and didn't sound overly repetitive (well, there is a lot of repetition but that's not uncommon in this type of jazz).
Overall Suno worked much better than I was expecting and I look forward to experimenting with it more. It's possible that because I picked jazz as the genre and jazz can sometimes be a bit random or chaotic, I'm being deceived by AI's effectiveness. And while I do value the work of professional composers/musicians and will always favor supporting them when I am able, having the tool of AI to help brainstorm or create less important audio tracks feels like a great asset as a game developer.
Afterthoughts
Where would I take this game if I put more time/resources into it? My original idea had an entire economy system attached to the art gallery and heists, where visitors would bring the gallery money, but they would get bored if the gallery was empty or stale - forcing the player to keep performing heists and attracting new visitors in order to keep up with the general expenses of the gallery slowly ticking down the player's money. Losing a heist minigame and getting "caught" would also put the player in jail, which they could use the gallery funds to pay a fine and get out - or play another minigame and escape!
Adding more minigames would also be a fun way to expand the game. Maybe instead of the heist minigames always being in a set order, they could be chosen randomly from a pool, and even displayed to the player when they select a heist - the more difficult ones being tied to a more "attractive" piece of art that would bring more visitors to the gallery.