It's kind of hard to talk about the development and design of Ham Jam. Not only because most of it was was made in a few days in 2022 (2 years ago), but also because it's one of those pun-based game concepts that kind of just sprang fully formed into my head during a 10 minute trip to the grocery store.  I had a bit of a fascination with looking stuff up about amateur radio and radio protocols used by air traffic control at the time, and I'm pretty sure the concepting fase of this project went something like this:

"What if we make a game where you have to jam a bunch of ham radio pirates?"
"Oh, we can call it Ham Jam!"
"Wouldn't it be funny if the thing they're communicating is a Star Wars ripoff joke?"
"Yup, I like this. Let's start making!"~

And then everything just kind of flowed from there with experimentation and quite little planning.

There's an interesting parallel/inversion between this project and Lankova, the project made after this (but actually released). Lankova started out as a little game feel prototype, which I then overengineered to actually have a functional parts damage system, and then turned into a game (or at least, a level). Ham Jam did the opposite, it started as a game concept, and slowly morphed into me going "how can we make this more playable and feel nice", and it ends up as one of those projects I was very proud of because of its feel and all the little things like changing cursors and a cool Credits animation.

So, if I was so proud about the feel, why was Ham Jam never released? 
I have  a rule for myself: anything I post on itch has to be independently playable. Ham Jam was... not that.

I had made a tutorial, after the entire game was already done. However, it was a rush job, and it was just an explanation over the radio how stuff worked. It was long, it was slow, and most importantly, it didn't work. I knew it was very unlikely to work, and playtesting confirmed that expectation. The playtesting comments were very logical too. Less explaining and more "learning by fucking around" would be helpful, as well as allowing someone to take in the information at their own pace. Even back then, the immediate idea was to make a sort of in-game manual or booklet.

But this is where a 1-2 motivation punch hit. I didn't feel like going through the trial-and-error process of making this tutorial at the time, especially since all this was made in a couple of high-focus days, and I needed some motivation or hype back before I'd be able to force my ADHD brain to go make and iterate that tutorial. Luckily, I had been in contact with a game art student in my year who was interested in making art for this project, and I'd given them a very detailed asset list. Anytime I work with an artist on stuff, there's always those moments of "OMG my game suddenly looks pretty!", which skyrockets my own motivation to do stuff. So I started waiting, and doing new stuff in the meantime. By the time I had figured that the artists had flaked on me without communicating that, I had a dozen new ideas and projects that were more interesting than finishing this. So Ham Jam ended on the "I'll finish this one day" pile.

And it stayed on that pile for two years. Sometimes, I'd show a little video of it, when talking about game feel with game designers at school, but I never returned to the project. Interestingly, a lot of my other projects have been influenced by the practice I got from making Ham Jam, most notably Lankova'd dedication to game feel and the UI and little quality of life additions to MMMMM. But, somewhere in 2024, while setting some goals for the year, I put "Finish Ham Jam" down as a goal for the year. It only needed a tutorial, I could do that in 1-2 days. 

Unfortunately, I hit a bit of a wall the past half a year. You might have noticed that nothing has been uploaded to itch in this time. Long story short, I had a bunch of life stuff going on, and then my work started sapping so much energy I didn't have any energy for making games (or anything else for that matter). But we've hit the brakes at work and we're fixing that, and lately energy has been back! I'm not entirely at the level yet where I can start a new longer-term project, but I found the motivation to at least hit that goal of finishing Ham Jam.

And so I did. I had 2 more years of making games under my belt by now, and making the tutorial was not as hard as I had built it up to be. I made it into a nice little in-game book, added some "exercises" to make sure the player understood the mechanics. I tested it, and it seems to work very well! I think the game is "done" for me now. There's a bunch of choices that 2022 Mana made that I feel like I could improve on, but I don't want this game to go back to the "I'll finish this one day" pile. So v1.00 it is, and if we feel like it, we can always make a version 1.1, right?

Thank you all for playing Ham Jam, for reading this, and for being around in general. Y'all rock!