Post Jester
(Click the gif or click here to play the game)
Been working on a Steam project for the last few months on and off so I haven't gotten to work on games very much these past months. This was a fun break from working on that, this game was made for the Texas State Bob Cat Boot Up Game Jam, an event lead by Octopus9000. Didn't end up winning but had a lot of fun working on this game. The theme was "April Fools" and the game was inspired by rage games like QWOP. Originally the game was going to feature a clown riding a unicycle, unsure why we changed it though.
Concept Art
(First drawing after the reveal of the theme)
I drew this quick mock-up of the gameplay on the night before the theme was revealed. I originally wanted the player to have to click on a wheel and turn it but i think the mouse balancing works better. This also features the first design of Zeppo
(First brainstorming session on the first night of the Jam)
We keep a whiteboard in our living room that we mostly use for miscellaneous nonsense doodles but it comes in handy for game dev work. In the corner you can see my first design of Zeppo and in the middle you can see the design by @awesomeROXAS. I decided to move a little closer towards his design but mixed some of my design in as well. In the other corner you can see the original idea for the juggling, we wanted you to have to press on a different letter for each ball, after some playtesting we found that it was obtuse and not very fun.
(Rough draft of the designs I was going to use in the game)
Pretty much the designs I ended up going with, the executioner was changed a bit though. This picture also features the cut Queen Pud, she was going to sit next to the King and pretty much do exactly what he did.
(Sketches of the Lose Screen, Thumbnail, and Menu)
In the jam version of the game I wanted there to be 2 knights standing side by side on the menu, but when we were working on the final version I realised I wouldn't be able to fit anything else on the menu
(Sketches of King and Queen reactions)
They were meant to react while you were playing the game, the more balls you juggled the cooler they'd think you were. We cut that at some point and now the king just laughs when he throws a ball at you
(Sketches for the gameplay)
I thought the chair was going to be 2d when I drew this but Mou modeled the chair in the 3d background they sent
(Sketches of Win Screen and Opening Cutscene)
Originally the 3 bald characters didn't have names but @Octopus9000 asked me if they did so I came up with some, the background characters also have names but I didn't write them down
(Sketch of Mou, Jack, and SpringySpringo)
Thank you Mou, Jack, and @SpringySpringo for helping on the game. I would've had a lot more work to be done if you hadn't. Go check out their pages, they all rock!
(Final sketches for the game)
Mid-May 2026 Update
Spent the last few months going from night shift to 2 jobs and then to day shift, so I didn't have much time to do anything. But now that I'm back down to 1 job I finally have free time to do art :) We also spent alot of time trying to set up the page for our STEAM GAME :D It's still a work in progress but I will make a news post about that when its ready
Upcoming
As I said earlier, Mellow Minds is officially dropping a Steam game soon :D
I'm super excited about it, it's going to be called "The Mellow Collection" it'll feature all of our newgrounds games from Tomato Clicker to Captain X-Mas! We're still hard at work on it and I wish I could share some pictures of it but I ran out of image embeds for this post so I will post about it in a news post and an art piece sometime soon
Seeya Next Month
Follow me on Twitter and Instagram where I post game development posts every so often, I hope to post more to YouTube this year (possibly streaming some art/game dev stuff)
