Posted June 19, 2022 by Ismael Rodriguez
Toy Cavers was made for The Lost Relic Games Jam, the theme was "Connection". I think we've all seen this idea of tethering characters together, when the theme was announce, it was the first thing I could think about. It's an idea I've carried for a little while.
While I did re-use a lot of code from past projects, I also did re-write a lot of stuff from the ground up. All my usually stuff is there, like scene controllers, sound managers, sprite animators, stuff like that. I used a lot of what I learned from making Below the Ocean, especially in regards to the basic tether mechanics, however, I wrote things like the tether code and and player mostly from scratch, or with a little copy-paste for the super redundant stuff.
The idea of making the characters toys occurred when I was thinking of ways to show the player which character they were controlling. I played with a few different methods, like flashing, and color swapping. The sprite flashing method was supposed to emulate old school transparency for the toy you didn't control, but I wasn't feeling it. I didn't like the color swapping (making pink to blue and blue to pink so the player would only ever control a blue or pink guy) because the brothers lost their identity. I didn't want to use alternative colors because the pallet is so limited and I think it just made things look more messy. So I tried an overhead arrow over the controlled character. It looked okay, and it got the job done, but I felt like something could be better. I animated the arrow to make it spin... I had it spinning over their heads, but I also wanted to try pointing it at their back. When the arrow was back there, it gave me the idea of making it look like a wind up toy, it worked really well with another idea I had, which was stopping the character's animator if they weren't controlled. It stuck, and I think it was a cool idea that helps give the game an identity AND inform the player.
This was my first weeklong jam. I liked the idea of a long jam because I really don't have time to try to squeeze a game out over a weekend, at least not one with so much to do. The longer period did give me a lot of time to tinker, especially in the early builds where I was trying to get the physics down.
I did still compromise A LOT and clamped down the scope because of the Jam. I have a lot of ideas I didn't get to play with, and I think people are going to ask about a 2-player mode.
also...
Bugs. There's definitely some bugs that are gonna creep up lol. I actually had to scramble to get the web build working because it was having some problems the PC build didn't have, or I didn't run into *fingers crossed* lol
Overall I like what came out! Thanks for checking it out!