Shapeshift. That was my favorite theme of the lot, so I was pretty stoked but unfortunately I hadn’t found anyone in the area to team up with me and as hours passed I realized I really wasn’t feeling like coding. I quickly gave up the idea on doing it in Unity cause I’m still very noob in C# so I went back to Multimedia Fusion 2 which I hadn’t used in like a year or two…
Since I was just feeling like doing pixels, I started with what became the infiltration phase which is basically just a big medieval castle illustration. Now I realize that this was probably the best choice I’ve made for a jam: not having to deal with scrolling, camera work and de-spawning issues in MMF2 is a life saver! I motivated myself to start coding by saturday evening and then things went very fast very well.
(The day / infiltration phase)
I surprised myself having time for RPG style upgrades, and fully doing the night / platformer action phase. If I had kicked myself in the ass on friday to start coding and take this seriously I would actually would have had time to submit for the compo. On Sunday game had a full loop, 2 endings, 8 type of ennemies and the possibility to keep playing as an endless survival mode to beat your highscore. It left me with monday to fully focus on making sounds, picking the right musics and making a full boss battle and 2 extra endings.
Here’s what went well and wrong in short:
Good
– MMF 2 is great for prototyping, could progress really fast and no big coding issue came up
– having no scrolling allowed to evaluate art needed very easily and gave me time to focus on the fun stuff: making a bunch of creatures.
– Kept the animation minimal but readable. Villagers are 2 frames and the second one is the same as the first one with a few pixels moved lower. That’s enough for a walk cycle at that distance.
– removing the possibility to jump in infiltration phase got rid of all kind of collision issues coming up with MMF2. instead I took inspiration from the Looney Tunes game on game boy, with a rigid stair system that worked really well for an infiltration game.
Bad
– The instanced sprite system in MMF2 is a nightmare so having a lot of creatures at the same time created some bugs where villagers or guards teleport around.
– I play a lot of platformers and despite knowing that I make them too hard for average players… Well, I still made the night phase too hard. I still haven’t learned to properly balance a more welcoming and gradual difficulty.
– MMF2 by default only lets export to windows and all my attemps at getting Mac builds were rather unsuccessful so only a limited pool of players can access my game.
If you wanna take a look at my entry:
And since I had so much fun doing it, I’ve been continuing working on it and fixed pretty much all the bugs, added controller support, improved the boss battle, etc…
Ludum dare version and post versions are there: https://brobbeh.itch.io/dopple-trouble
Cheers!
– blob