This postmortem might be a bit late and a bit long but here it is anyway!

First, there needs to be an introduction. The Scream Machine Game Jam was my first game jam, so I just gained some experience that might be useful to a fellow developer that is interested in taking part in a jam. Like it or not, here is how I made "Incident at work"

Pre-Production!
Well, the Scream Machine Game Jam was a 10-day jam so that should be how long I work on the game, right? Well, not exactly. I started making the game on the fourth day so, in total, it took me 7 days. The reason, I was late to start was honestly because I was not sure what to make. I knew I wanted to make a found-footage style game for a while so this game jam was the right opportunity. The problem was I had no idea what to make the game about. While I was late to start making the game, it worked great for the theme because the ideas I had, in the beginning, were terrible. So the first lesson learned was to wait for the right idea to come and not start making the first thing that comes to mind.

Making of!
After making a very simple and short storyboard (which I am not going to share because my drawing skills are awful), I was ready to start developing. The good thing about Unreal Engine is the starter templates are very useful for when you are short on time like I was. The template I picked was the Third Person Template, which doesn't seem right for a first-person horror but after you fix the camera position and remove the jumping mechanic it makes a great looking first-person view of your body.  Also, I got picked some basic assets that fitted the tone I was going for from the Unreal Engine Marketplace and I was set to make the environment.

The environment!
The whole game takes place in one "room" so that room had to be carefully designed. The layout is pretty simple but it turned out to be very effective. There are three "subrooms":
The "surveillance", where it is supposed to feel like a safe place. It is the place you start, it is better lit than the rest of the room and you find your instructions there. Most of the "scary parts" take place in that room, deliberately, to make the player feel like he is not safe anywhere.
Then there is the "hard drives place", which is the actual safe place where the player has to go to refill on hard drives.
And lastly, the "server room" which is repetitive and harder to navigate to disorientate the player. The player always has a view of the first room so he doesn't get lost.

Atmosphere!
Something the worked well for the game was the atmosphere. While polishing the environment, I went for the old sci-fi horror look with lots of meaningless lights and buttons. The early 00s also gave a nice touch with old technology (I grew up with that technology so it feels nostalgic).

The VHS look!
So here is where things took a bad turn. Going into this project I expected the found-footage part to be simple, you put a VHS filter and it is done, right? No! The way Unreal Engine works, you have to make the filter using post-process effects and I had no idea how to do that. Searching the web I found no simple answer on how to make a good VHS effect in UE4. For the rest of this paragraph, I have to get technical to explain what I did, so if you have no interest in how UE4 handles shaders you can skip this. 
Disclaimer: I am not an expert, in fact, I had to learn most of this stuff while making this game, so if you are an expert and I sound like a noob please don't be rude.
To make a complex post-process effect in UE, you have to make a post-process material. I am not experienced with UE materials because they mostly work with nodes and not a shading language. There are, however, many great resources online that help with learning material nodes so I started with that. After getting a good idea of how a post-process material works, it was time to figure out what makes VHS tapes feel like VHS tapes. I watched hours of VHS tapes on Youtube and tutorials on how to make a VHS filter on Adobe Premiere, taking notes on the technics used and what looked good for me. After I figured out how to make a good VHS filter, it was time to translate it to UE and make adjustments. A problem was that the player had to read notes around the environment to figure out what to do and the VHS filter made reading painful, so I had to make to VHS filter subtle and make the image sharper. Another problem that came up was that UE user interface does not inherit the post-process effects. Making the VHS look took most of the time I had for the jam, so in the end, I had to say this is as good I can make it and move on. 
Note: Making the aspect ratio 4:3 and the FOV 60 degrees, I feel gave a nice character to the game.

Final touches!
After making the game playable from start to finish and with very little time left, I started polishing. I had the idea for the universe this game takes place from the beginning so it was not hard to write the notes, brochures and posters that are placed around the environment. Carefully picked the sounds for the environment and the game was ready, just a couple of hours before the deadline. Because I was so pressured by time, I was, unfortunately, not able to have someone playtest the game before posting, so some things went wrong.

What went wrong!
I wanted the game to be slow, give time for the player to look around the environment and read the notes. I believe, however, that I made the start of the game too slow. Most people don't care to read every little thing in the game and the time before anything happens is more than enough to do that, so next time I believe it is better to make the game faster than you wanted than slower. The other thing that went wrong was the performance, not paying attention to optimize the performance was a big mistake. I only playtested the game on my main PC so I only realized how bad the performance was when I tried it on a laptop. Both of these problems are addressed in the update that will be released shortly after this devlog goes live!

Conclusion!
Overall, making this project and taking part in a game jam for the first time was a great experience! I hope you can also gain something from reading this dear reader. My plans, right now, are to release an update for this game (adding new scenes) and continue work on my other project:

https://unknown-x.itch.io/this-game-is-real