Post-Mortem: AbsorbAbility
3 minutes read •
Lore, objective and rules
You just woke up and need to eat breakfast quickly before leaving the house. You only have biscuits left in the pantry. And you only like them when they're perfectly soaked. Nothing upsets you more than a piece of broken biscuit floating in your mug.
Objective: Use the mouse to dunk the biscuits into the milk. (Please imagine your preferred kind of milk).
If the biscuit isn't wet enough, you'll need to keep dunking it. If the biscuit's too to wet, it will break, and it will float in the milk, and you'll be sad. However, if the biscuit's juuuuust right, you feel joy.
The "bites left" indicator tells you how many bites you need to eat the biscuit. Naturally, the more you eat, the smaller bites (and the more) you take, because the fuller you are. (Or that is my rationalization for giving this game some kind of challenge).
If all of the bites of a biscuit break, it's game over.
Also, you get more points if you're faster. That's why there's a stopwatch in the bottom left.
I wanted to challenge myself and put my Godot skills to the test. I found the Brackeys Jam (2025.2) , which ran for a week and I decided to participate.
I still had to work full-time and had other things to attend to in my private life, so I couldn't dedicate my entire time to it. Also, I decided to work on it on my own, because I wanted to see how far I could get.
In hindsight, I have to say that it would've been better to have a Game Designer on the team. As soon as the theme was published: "Risk it for the Biscuit", the idea hit me, that dunking biscuits into milk is a high risk and high reward affair. I saw how it could easily be translated into a small and quirky game.
While I do think that I achieved the quirkiness that I wanted and I implemented the mechanics I had planned, the progression and objectives are rather lame. I think the wet biscuit effect works pretty well, though I had planned to include different kinds of biscuits, I didn't have the time to make them look the way the I would've liked.
Additionally, the biscuit wetness effect is implemented in such a way that it precisely wets the cookie when inside the milk. But, due to last-minute changes to the game objective, this precision got replaced with a simpler indication of which "bite" of the biscuit is being dunked. Like, I wanted to have better progression, so I made the player take smaller and smaller bites of the biscuit. If I let it get wet like before, without adding more UI, it would be hard for the player to know what was going on. With more time, and with the help of a Game Designer, we could've come up with a better mechanic or a better display of gameplay status.
It was the first time that I implemented this much UI in Godot, and though the codebase for it isn't great (which is a given for game jams), at least I got to make it look nice.
You can find the source code on Codeberg