Posted June 18, 2021 by jonah-srg
#postmortem #arcade #action #puzzle #devlog
What fun putting this game together was. GMTK 2021 was by no means my first game jam, but it is the first 48-hour deadline game jam that I have taken on solely by myself. I've been making games as a hobbyist now for about a year and half, and my previous jam experience has mostly been in longer forms. So let's talk the pitch, the bad, and the good:
Truth be told I was itching to make a puzzle game prior to the theme announcement. When I saw "Joined Together", the first thing I thought was some kind of Match-3. I was expecting many more matching oriented puzzle games to be submitted, so I suppose I was wrong on that front. The idea was to make an action puzzle game where "joining together" would be seen on multiple levels: Matching colors, joining two genres, and having some sort of supply chain reaching the masses. A soft drink supply chain with only four types of soda is what I ended up on, primarily on the idea that a can would be fun to animate.
I love old games, and I am particularly enamored with early NES black box games and their simultaneously commonplace and wild qualities. When I play it, I get vibes of Wrecking Crew, Dr. Mario, Yoshi, and maybe Wario's Woods or Donkey Kong 3. It's kind of odd to so fondly reminisce about (and even revere) these lovely but ultimately mediocre games. The "Jr." in the title is a cheeky homage to these arcadey type games, I figured it would help like-minded players (see: people who like bad games) find it in the sea of other games. So if anyone else played it and picked up on those vibes, I guess this one was for you?
A lot of things went really well on the project. The first assets were the cans and player sprites, and I'm really happy with both. The colors pop, and I tried to add a sort of color accessibility option with the letters associated with each color. I hadn't quite thought up the "next piece" interface being the smaller cans at that point, so I may have shot myself in the foot in that way. I'd love to hear if this helped anyone, or if I ended up botching it in the end. The player character is very simple, but against the colors and other elements I think it all has just enough personality to sing. I come from an art school background but can't draw, so whenever something reads "game" and "fun" to me I consider it a success.
The sounds are also a real win to me, less so because of the quality and more so that I was able to add a lot of my personality to the game. I had previously used Famitracker for all my previous game sounds, but the application seemed to be entirely broken on my machine so I made the switch to Famistudio about 1-2 weeks before the jam. I am an electric bass player and can shed out a 12-bar blues in F like it's nothing, but putting it into Famistudio was surprisingly challenging, and was a good brain exercise for something that is usually muscle memory on an instrument. It fit all the requirements: Felt old school and arcadey, and could be looped at least a couple times before getting old.
---
Thanks for reading along! I hope to get back to playing more jam games before the judging period ends. If any of this was interesting to you, I've got the link below to the rating page right here. My Twitter is boring but I'll keep making games like this, so you may want to follow along for my absurd axe throwing RPG or snow shoveling adventure game.