boy i sure hope i'm not too late to start making these devlogs.
hello everybody i am Vix. i'm begginer level at C++, and i've read A Whole Ton about game design. i'd been meaning to make a game for a while now, so when i read about this game jam i decided that it Must Have Been Fate and joined it along with two friends, making for a three-man team for this 15-day game jam. i wanted to sharpen my game design skills by Actually Designing stuff, matilda (the Master of this game's art) wanted to get a good practice on sprites and art design plus coding C++, and emma wanted in on practicing pixel art. we're using the free version of game maker for this one, and it's the first game any of us has worked on
but now for the game proper.
You play as JUSTICE BOT in her quest to free the world of all that is twisted, using your trusty JUSTICE FISTS to conquer evil. It's an action platformer, a mix of beat-em-up and Risk-of-rain-esque gameplay with 2d brawler feel to it. The game is centered essentially around strategic decisions mid-combat, timing and response speed, making for a fast-paced game.
If you Want The Longer Explanation:
(LONG EXPLANATION START, and bear in mind, this is a lot of Work In Progress)
Throughout the game, the player will have access to four distinct attacks: a basic attack, and three special abilities, and one ultimate ability(cough leagueoflegends cough). Ability charges are generated as the player fights with Justice Bot's basic attacks, giving them one charge every half dozen or so hits the player succesfully lands without being interrupted, which allow the player access to those three special abilities. Each type of attack has an element (Impact, Electric, Plasma or JUSTICE), and each ability has its own quirks, each of them bringiog different things to the battlefield, which is where the second mechanic comes in.
Enemy synergy is based around the three enemy types: the fodder, the enforcers and the gunners. The fodder by themselves are weak and Don't Do Much Damage, but there are a lot of them and they can potentially overwhelm the player and hitstun him into Death. The enforcers are slow, very slow, but to compensate for it their attacks are devastating and they cannot be hurt by normal means while their shield is up. The gunners are very much a wip, but their stuff is that they can interrupt the player from afar on the tradeoff that they are not mobile like the fodder and not strong like the enforcers.
The gameplay itself centered around using different strategies against different enemy compositions. For example, if on the current part of the level there are way more gunners than fodder, the player might opt to use their charges to use their teleporting ability to take on the gunners hand-to-hand, choosing mobility to dispatch them, or they might save up their charges for a Special Version of a skill that allows the player to hit from afar, sacrificing all of their charges (and becoming a prime target for an enforcer) to take out gunners and "hole up", staying in one place maintaining their ground. Each enemy is weak to certain element types, and strategies that work in certain conditions won't work in others,
(LONG EXPLANATION END)
TL;DR: you'll be using different abilities to target different enemies' weaknesses, and different combinations of abilities to take out different compositions of enemies, and mistakes in judgement or execution can cost a player the game.
our goals with this game are essentially:
-making a tight 2d action game
-not blow up with stress while making the game
-Actually Finishing the game
it's kind of different to see all the games being developed so full of Soul and Inspiration, but we just set out to make a mechanically sound game that feels and looks right to play, bcuz since we are developing this with more than one person it'd be very hard to pinpoint a particular style, feeling or message to evoke. we still Probably won't pull the "tight" part off perfectly but Hey, you gotta start somewhere.
ONTO PROGRESS SHOTS
how the game was on day 1
how it is now
yeah i guess there wasn't that much progress in level design but Hey. matilda and emma have been working Hard on the sprites and i died about thirteen times writing the code for user input + enemy AI (at least thirty hours were spent quietly suffering with bugs and muttering "why are enemies flying into the air? where is my character? why is this happening to me?") so it's been great fun so far.
in the 7 days we still have, we still have to finish a set of sprites for enemies + background + an Attempt at sound design, and i still have to design:
plus polishing the attacks to Actually Feel satisfying, so there's still a lot of work to be done, but i'm looking forward to the challenge
