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 game is won or lost based on if you've correctly identified your target.
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. 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 pain to write and test. Especially under a tight deadline.
That said, I'm proud of the system we built. It's flexible and could carry a much larger game if we revisited it. That being said, it could definitely use some much needed improvements that would make it a bit easier to use.
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.
One other thing to mention is that this was the first time we really leaned into the "Rat Haven Studios" identity as a team. Before, it was mostly just Kob and I making games together, but this time we got more people involved and considered the possibility of being a "studio" rather than just a duo. Primarily of note, this was when lop3ze joined the team and became our primary artist.
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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