Hi!
Very cool thread, I enjoyed reading through those stories! So here's mine. ;) By day I manage two IT projects and teach at a university in Poland (mostly soft skills and basics of game design, as those are two of my passions :D). By night I play games, make games, read about games and watch everything on game design I can find. ;) Right now I am actually looking for a new job and I decided to try and find an employer that will relocate me to the USA. :D I also am trying to transfer to game dev instead of IT, because being creative makes me much happier. The dream is to become a game designer, but my resume/CV probably shows the skills of a producer more, and I wouldn't mind that position either, I really enjoy management, and think I am quite good at it. ;)
Since all my usual partners in crime were busy over the weekend, a game I made for this jam was my second solo project. And the first one was a forum-based RPG I made as a kid over a decade ago! :D I usually work with friends putting myself in more of a design positions, and since for a few years I no longer professionally work *just* as a programmer I am a bit rusty with the actual dev part of game dev. I decided to take part in this jam anyways, flying solo, because I wanted to try my hand at 2D in Unity (always done 3D projects) and I wanted another small project finished to boost up my CV. ;)
I actually had tons of ideas for this jam, as the theme is very open, and it was hard to decide which to use. I was thinking a lot about one save file, and managing your way through a tree-like maze with it, or playing as the "save manager" for some virtual player (or many), but having only one slot (probably because I borrowed a ps2 from a student and I have a hard time working with a pretty full single 8MB memory card :D). I was thinking about an endless runner with many different actions, but all under one button (maybe showing "next skill" like the next block in tetris), or a platformer, where you could only see the level for "one moment" and then navigate in the dark. I was thinking of a game literally made of ones, like all the graphics would be made up of the visual representation of the number "1". I was thinking about a multiplayer racing game but with one car. And I really wanted to make a game named "A", because I just liked the idea of one letter as a name, and maybe it would be about singing "Aaaaah" in a right pitch to match given note, sort of like Guitar Hero with a single button/input. :D Most of those I found unplayable or unachievable in given time with the given team (me). So I decided for a simple platformer where you can only see one obstacle, but they are all still there (works best if you don't know that and die on the first hidden obstacle, so maybe just... do that on purpose if you come around to trying my game xD). At first I wanted to let the player switch between the visuals, letting him choose what to see (I had a prototype, where you could cycle through player, level, enemies and coins layers - was kinda cool, but I didn't like it that much, works better on paper than when you actually play it). I even had the code to change the background color ofo the level when you complete it twice, making the background the same color as the spikes, so they are not visible. I started making another enemy (orange! I thought red would make for a background a little bit too hard on the eyes) and planned on letting player change the background color in later stages. I felt like the cleverest dude on Earth and then I realized I kinda made a game that does the theme backwards - I can HIDE one type of obstacles, but SEE all of them, while I'd rather see ONLY ONE layer of obstacles. :D Ended up with a simple game where only one obstacle is seen at a time (the one you last died on). Spoiling it makes the experience less fun I guess, but oh well, I felt like sharing my thought process. :D By then I didn't have much time to juice my game up unfortunately, so I decided to prioritize sound and have some fun with it. So the sound you hear when you die or win is actually my own voice with no processing (because I cannot really work with audio ;p) and I had that idea to make the music add one layer every time you win that I wanted to try out. So I found some samples (11? 12? Something like that), mixed them together, liked the effect and made some tricks in Unity to get it to work and synchronize. Still, Unity made it "skip a beat" after each loop (apparently a well known bug ;/), but at least it is synchronized (had some headaches with that). Overall I like the final effect, I learned a lot and had fun, that's what counts, right? :D
I cannot really dream of ending up featured, there are too many people better, smarter and more experienced than me in this topic alone. And some actual, experienced game developers, nice! So I do not really need anyone to rate my game - my goal is achieved anyway, I put it in my CV. :D I just really liked the topic and wanted to contribute, and I love writing, as you can probably see by that mountain of a post. Still, if after reading all that you are interested in seeing this concept in action, I will not leave you hanging. :D Here's the game: https://itch.io/jam/gmtk-2019/rate/462050
Cheers!