First Post and Post-Mortem

Day 1:

I didn't actually do a devlog during the process of making this game, but I feel it would be good to reflect on it anyway.

The Friday of this game jam was dedicated to just whiteboarding some ideas out. I decided the core theme attatched to this game would be a ship that is constantly accelerating. This sort of grew into the idea that you can only control a ship with acceleration, not by directly changing velocity.

I was always a fan of the metroidvania genre, so i decided to make one using these mechanics and see how it felt.

I thought it'd be useful to draw out the entire map, and got a pretty decent world draft.

Day 2:

For the map, I used Gimp to create 1000x1000 sections of the map, which I then connected in Unity. Over the course of the game I allowed for modifying the size slightly (using intervals of 250px). I think this worked out pretty well. It wasn't too much of a hassle to add new maps. I definitely think I'm gonna reuse this idea if I ever make another game like this.

In terms of implementing weapons I decided it was just easier to go with basic bullets. At this point I was aware of the time crunch, and while I wanted to add a beam based weapon, I kinda just felt like it was best to not do it. Definitely the right call looking back. Gotta protect against short term scope.

I also wanted slightly more complicated enemies, but again time crunch. This is why all enemies either bounce back and forth, and why the core is just a spinning thing. I wanted a boss fight, but there was no way I was doing anything too crazy, so I just tried to make it as interesting as possible using the tools I had, that basically being the ion barriers.

At this point, it was 4 in the morning, so I saved the rest for this morning.

Day 3:

I really wanted an escape sequence to make the game end on a cool note, so the first thing I implemented this morning was that. It was easy enough to add a chasing explosion, and to add a path with doors. This was definitely an efficient way of doing this without spending to much time, since the only code was a basic path following script.

Once that was done, and I added the basic "You win" ending, it was mostly just Juice and bug-fixing. Sound and screen shake really made things feel a lot better. I wish I had time to add some more graphics effects (like the thrust from the player ship), but I was fine to sacrifice it.

Looking Back:

I think the biggest mistake made during this project was not starting prototyping on the first day to see if the core concept was fun. I married myself to this idea on Friday, so if it did not feel very good to play, I probably would not have been able to submit anything I would be happy with. In addition, if I prototyped on Friday, it would also have been much less coding the following day, which would have helped with the burnout I was starting to feel.

Overall, I'm still pretty happy with the result though. I think I managed to pump out a relatively fun game with a decent map size for the amount of time that was given.

New Techniques I learned:

The biggest was the map design methods. I essentially just created a black and white image (more specifically an alpha-white image) that allowed me to relatively easily create a map component. This was surprisingly easily to modify, as a sort of modular map system.

Hacky save systems. I created a relatively hacky save system where all saveable object would implement an interface with a save or load method that returned and accepted a string to string map. This map stored the state of the object. It probably wouldn't be too hard to just make this use JSON instead