So! Mickio here, writing a post on the creation of our hit game Basilisk. this has been my first video game project as a game designer and while my two cousins had done games before, this was their first one to make from beginning to end as they always feature creep'd their projects into oblivion. On top of that they weren't ultra familiar with Unity when it comes to 2d projects so lets just say that we didn't start this project with professionalism and confidence.
The first step for me and for the game was to pick a cart. I always gravitate towards fantasy wether I want to or not but as I scanned these awesome pieces of art one of them jumped at me not only through its aesthetics but also the game idea that jumped into my mind almost immediately after looking at it.
This beautiful piece of clay art by Philip Summers really piqued my interest. The large snake-like basilisk reminded me of many older arcade games such as Donkey Kong or Sinistar where the marquee character was normally the antagonist. The basilisk also then reminded me of Snake, the classic game of being bored with a crappy phone. The idea then came to me of making a game where you goal was not to collect fruits as the snake but instead to kill said snake before he became too big to handle. The fact the protagonist would be a lady was also a nice plus as most of my works were either pretty damn neutral or a bit too man-centric due to premade assets not having a lot of girl characters or simply a creative choice.
Once I showed it to the cousins and they agreed on the concept and the idea of making a snake AI excited Kevin, I jumped on a pile of paper to begin writing and drawing down the design document, bible of mechanics for any project. My goal was to create a score attack arcade-y game similar to other masterworks of the genre such as Annalynn and Cook-out! with Toadette. Two games which were big influences throughout the process in terms of recreating an early arcade feel in modern times with modern techniques. This is the original and first of like 4 pages of documentation i ended up writing.
As you can see its a bit chaotic but while things changed such as the spawn rate of peasants, houses and mountains amongst other things, this was the basic gist of the game and it still is right now. You might notice how obtuse the move and spawn rates of things is with a ton of different gradations. While this was firstly to make sure there was a feel of constant progress to each level, this was also inspired by a lot of Namco and Konami games from that era such as Tower of Druaga (also a big inspiration) and Xevious which had arcane and obtuse mechanics you would never know outside of looking at dip switches through a magnifying glass but were open for young me to read and tinker with as a child when playing the ds collections of namco and konami games which allowed me to really delve into how old arcade games worked design and tech wise.
One inspiration that also definitively snuck its way in there without me noticing was the Trogdor "arcade" game by the brother chaps. From the NPCs being called peasants to the way they come out of cottages and are eaten by the big bad lizard, it was a concept I think could have really used expansion and I do hope to have made it justice here.
After that we got to work on actually making the damn thing. While my cousins were programming I worked on well...everything else ahah! First priority for me was the art needed for the game. I dug through tons of asset packs I had gotten from the bundle for racial justice or somesuch along with making some custom art here and there such as the grid and Basilisk along with modifying sprites like the protagonist which originally looked more like princess peach than a brave adventurer. Sadly the sprite was too small and my skills not good enough to really do it justice but oh well.
I tried adding feet but couln't make it look good enough. Soon enough we had actual game mechanics going on and after tweaking some numbers and making a big list of remaining tasks to keep the team motivated i jumped on looking for music and SFX to add to the game. We didn't really have the time for me to bust out the synthesizer and make sound effects but we got some real nice ones along with some songs that....kinda fit? That era of arcade games we were shooting for had really nice sprites but mostly nonexistant bloopy music which I couldn't find that I liked but the one we found was really friggin great so it worked either way. The only sounds I made from scratch was the digitized voices which me and Derick thought would be hilarious for the game to have horribly bitcrunched voices and I think it was. I just recorded myself being an idiot in audacity and did some tricks until it sounded terrible enough to be convincing and short enough to not be utterly annoying, only a little bit ;).
It took us about two weekends and some work in-between to finish the project to a point we thought was good enough. We would have continued polishing it (along with adding a multiplayer mode where one player controls the Basilisk!) but we ran out of time as the month nearly ended (before a time extension happened!) and the cousins were moving back near Montreal to continue their studies as they were only here for summer break. If we were to keep working on it and make a deluxe version, i'd love to port it on steam and maybe make a few bucks on it but I doubt that will happen realistically for a long long while.
Anyway, I hope you enjoy the game and have lots of comments to leave below so I know what I need to improve in my future designs. I mainly do board and card games so this was a first for me as a designer so i'd love to hear some feedback! I am free for new projects now and im quite happy to have participated in that one, though. With this subtle advertising for me done, I wish everyone a good game jam and a nice day!