(Cross-posted from https://cohost.org/sakiamu/post/745711-2022-in-review-vide)
So, a lot happened this year. For me, personally, it’s been a very creatively fulfilling year, but I think that came at a cost I need to be careful of.
For me, the big thing of my hobby efforts in 2021 was Janet and participating in The Crucible creative writing challenges. That rolled over into 2022 a bit, but as my ADHD got more medicated, the novelty of forging my own libraries and struggling against gaps in Janet’s library ecosystem appealed to me less and less. It’s not that Janet was (or is) a bad language, just that I was ready to not have to build things from the ground up for a while.
But, I did do one last major project (amidst the large number of minor projects I did in Janet, somewhere north of 40): Sparkworks. I created it for the 2021 Lisp Game Jam, and I really like that I pulled off a game that was a chill vibe, instead of an action game. To be honest, part of the reason for doing that was because Noah Gibbs had commented once in a conversation with me about how action games weren’t his speed, heh.
I decided to move from Janet to Fennel, so I could re-enter working in Love2D, and by doing so, create web builds for my work a lot more easily. I still did (and do, to be honest) like working in small Paren-based languages. I started on a program I called Vectron, designed to help create Atari-style vector art for use in Love2D games. Using Vectron in the 2022 Love2D game jam, I ended up creating a game about saving fish from a missile attack as a submarine with a lightning gun charged by movement.
Such is what happens when you work try to make a mobile action game with a bit of political commentary (on the Russia/Ukraine war, though somewhat indrectly).
The anti-imperialist sentiment and general awe at how well the Ukrainian armed forces were handling the Russian invasion seeped into Fault Lines a lot:
It’s not really very subtle, but it’s also not anchored to a specific conflict either (even as the dominant one definitely influence the flavor of it). I do think it’s a high water mark for what I’ve done in Love2D, though. It’s got a decent amount of variety, it’s got a working camera (which was a neat thing to add), and it has clearer feedback than my previous Love2D vector game.
And, for a while, that was the main thing I finished. Before the Love2D Game Jam, in an effort to keep gamedev from taking over my life, I decided to do it on a timer during the first time slot I could find in the day, for 30ish minutes. I actually managed to do this for a while, and Vectron got a lot of work done on it, and reached a 80/20 point where a lot of the work would be going more towards polish the features for a while. I also started work on a Match-3 game, one that I wanted to tell a story fom 7 points of view. That project eventually foundered a fair bit, due to life, and due to not being quite sure how to manage all of those points of view, as well as struggling to implement multiple Match-3 mechanics like I’d want to. Lua’s lack of easy access to compound value types (aka C structs) that are compared and hashed memberwise made some of the tactics I’d used in Godot and Janet harder to apply, and with 30 minutes a day, with a couple hours on the weekend, I never quite manged an abstraction I was happy with to work around that. I think if I were to revisit this, I’d be using LDtk or Tiled to help build some of that logic out, like I’d do later to much success in Godot.
The Game Maker’s Toolkit 2020 game jam marked my return to participating in Game Jams, after nearly 3 years of being unable to pull anything together under a deadline. As such, it is my one current yearly game development tradition. This year, ended up teaming up with an artist who specifically advertized working with Pixel Art: RafazCruz.
The game we ended up creating, Dicegeon, was a clear victim of far too much complexity being in play for a weekend jam. It was a lane-based Tower Defence game, inspried by Plants vs Zombies, but instead normal towers, dice were used to decide if an attack would succeed or not. And the enemies were based on the different faces of a D6. It got good marks for the creativity and presentation, but rather poor ranks for the enjoyment, due to the game needing missing a lot of polish. It had a cool idea, and that idea needed a lot of moving pieces to really work out at the time.
I cannot recommend this in a weekend game jam. I got wrapped around how to introduce dice into a PvZ game, and created something that had neat ideas, but desperately needed another design pass.
But, that’s how jams go sometimes, especially for me. I’m… called to by the siren song of “Ooh, that’s a cool idea” when it comes to complexity at times. One big thing this year has been slowly breaking me of that, a bit.
Some things that came out of that weekend:
Dicegeon ended up in the top 400ish in most GMTK rating categories, except for enjoyment, where it landed below the top 1000 entries. Which, fair. It landed in front of GMTK a rather buggy mess, heh.
A friend and I did Star Sea as a 2-month long gamedev project for the 2022 Trans Representation Game Jam, building it in Godot because I offered to help out if Godot was used instead of Unity. This overlapped with the GMTK 2022, and also ended up feeding into the start of the Godot Jam Bender. I do like what we ended up: A decently polished 2D side-scrolling shooter. There are definitely things I’d change about how the story was presented, in retrospect. It was a neat project, though some of the boss fights and waves definitely ended up being a bit on the complicated/fiddly side to build, taking advantage of the async GDScript lessons I’d picked up from Dicegeon.
Scrap Hive was easily the most effort I put into a project in 2022. This didn’t make it the best project I took part in 2022, by a long shot, those were yet to come, but it did mark a big piece of effort.
As a first background, I was a childhood Metroid Prime fan. One of the biggest things that I enjoyed about it was the sense of place that the art and sound direction pulled off. So, my interest in Metroidvanias (which has been around for some time) has almost always been in aganst that background, in the exploration of the drifts, swamps, spires, and caverns of Tallon IV, and far less the caves and tunnels of Zebes. So, for me, doing at least one MVM entry felt like a bit of a white whale, a bit of gamedev practice I wanted to do at least once.
I’d come off of finishing Star Sea, so I knew I could help manage a longer project. I sought out an artist, teamed up with a composer just because someone else in the MVM server considered them unapproachable, and ended up working with another learning Godot dev.
I also decided to attempt doing a Metroidvania platformer in a 3x3 map layout. I’ve discussed that in more detail over here, but the upshot was that helped make the map easier to expand, and helped build the sort of backtracking that Metroidvanias are known for
There were two things about Scrap Hive that kinda brought it down a bit as a project:
I decided to try to build a 2.5D parallax effect that looked cool (if a bit weird), but took a lot of effort away from other aspects of the game, which meant not having a very impactful ending, among other things.
And, the team only halfway gelled, creatively. The biggest impact was that the artist had a lot of personal life things come up, which kept them from being able to build much, so partway through, I ended up trying to fill in some gaps, and ended up receiving some help from GDeavid. The end result was that a lot of the game ended up using Palette swaps, and the same cross-barred texture on the boxes that made up most of the environment, and the enemies looked like they came from a rather different art style.
And, for most of the game’s lifespan, the main character was the Godot icon, with a wrench that had a lot more reach, and when the final character sprites came in, they were a very different animation profile, which shifted the balance of a lot of combat encounters.
Overall, though, more of the feedback came back positive than I expected. The end of a long jam project tends to be a slog, but the end result of Scrap Hive, if a bit aesthetically… strange (a lot of that was my fault for choosing to use red shadows to block off much of the map, a choice I don’t think I’d go with again, but made sense to me at the time, lol).
Overall, Scrap Hive was nice to see come together, but wasn’t what I’d hoped to make in an MVM entry. It didn’t have the vibes that Metroid and Metroid Prime established so well. It had it’s own, different, mishmash of things going on, some of them cool, some of them just strange.
Scrap Hive ended up placing 11th in MVM 17, which was quite respectable.
One of the running themes in the last 3 Godot game jam projects was that, from Dicegeon to Scrap Hive, they were all complicated projects, with lot of moving/interacting pieces. Gum Runner was almost the polar opposite: It was aggressively simple, an entry for Mini Jam 116, where it had a very simple idea: Navigate procedural generated mazes on a table top against a timer, until you run out of time. Another of RafazCruz’s friends, Staintocon, recruited me into the jam, and brought along an artist friend of his. The main wrinkles were getting Y-sorting set up properly, setting up AStar to keep the levels generated completable and trying to balance the time gain against the rising difficulty.
The end result was a neat little arcade experience that also fit really well on phones. It also took 3rd place in the Minijam, which was the first time I’d placed in the top 3 in a game jam, ever. It also ended up being the first $2 that anyone ever paid for a game I’d been part of making.
What was also neat about Gum Runner is that it was the first time I’d taken part in a game jam where I didn’t wreck my sleep schedule during the weekend in question. That pattern wouldn’t hold, but it was nice to see that it was possible.
In the aftermath of Scrap Hive, I wanted to keep doing gamedev as a hobby, so I started doing One Hour Game Jam (1hgj) entries. I ended up doing six of them before I stopped. The main problem with 1hgj for me is that it’s space at the start of the weekend tended to throw me off the rest of weekend. I’m glad I took a stab at building them, though, since it also let me build a couple of games as birthday presents for family members. That project has been put on hold for now, heh.
You can find a collection of the 1hgj entries here: https://itch.io/c/2788192/1hgj
Scrap Hive didn’t end with the atmosphere I’d been looking for in a Metroidvania, and I had an itch to see what I could build when I wasn’t spending 25% of the time building and optimizing a 2.5D graphics gimmick.
So, as MVM 18 rolled around, I decided to try to pull something together with a lower effort art style (and with a lot of help from GDeavid on that front. The art is 95% his). And I worked with the musician from Scrap Hive to build a soundscape that was a lot more atmopsheric.
And, even though it had maybe 45% of the effort that Scrap Hive had put into it, it landed a lot closer to what I was aiming for in terms of vibes, heh. But, the effort of building a game of that scope over the holiday season definitely put me in a place where I’m ready to take a break from gamedev, and from projects that have a hard deadline outside of work.
There’s a lot that could be said about EYES, but a lot of it has already been said in the very detailed jam feedback comments, heh.
The only thing that I’d add is that EYES feels like a really nice note to end the year on. It succeeded on a lot of fronts, from vibes, to having neat and varied design, to feeling something like a meaningful study in Metroidvania design. That my team and I were able to capture a lot of what makes an Metroidvania special, heh.
I think the best thing to happen to me in 2022 as far as gamedev went was finding people to team up with. That brought a much higher level of art and audio to the projects I helped on.
So, the first thing I have planned for gamedev in 2023 is a break. In the last 6 months I made 13 games, three of them were multi-week projects, two of them placing third in their jams! It’s been a busy 6 months, heh.
After that, I have plans on trying out 7DRL, 7DFPS, GMTK 2023, and maybe the 2023 edition of the Wowie Jam.
Besides that, I’ve got two games that I want to try to expand into commercial releases.
Did you like this post? Tell us
Leave a comment
Log in with your itch.io account to leave a comment.