But first, have some evil holiday wishes !

Development notes

-The villain’s rules was our first game together (and Zimra’s first game ever), and as a couple we thought it might be tricky. But it turned out to be a brilliant experiment, we had fun… and learned what we should NOT say to each other when we’re working XD

–Our concept: If you’ve seen Scream, Cabin in the woods* or enough horror movies to figure out how they work, you know there are strict rules to follow if you want to survive a horror movie. The most famous one being: “don’t wander alone, stay with the group !”
But why is this one so effective when you have quasi  invincible villains who could kill a dozen puny humans without breaking a sweat ?
Well… because VILLAINS HAVE RULES TOO ! (And one of them is… “You can kill them only if they’re alone”).
(* if you haven’t yet, you should, it’s a brilliant movie !)

–The tools of the trade: Unity and Photoshop.

==> Play the game <==

What went right

• spending time on developing one of our first idea… and giving it up.
  The “victims” (3 for a start, each of them with different strength/weaknesses: a strong man, a brainiac, and a lucky one) entered a room with 3 doors. As the villain, you place traps in the 3 adjacent rooms. You have 5 cards at your disposal featuring various traps, each coming with different characteristic (some would require strength to survive, other brain, with the addition of poison trap, neutral card, etc…), and visibility (the trap can be visible to the victims, invisible, or seen as the opposite kind of trap).
  Depending on what they can see by opening all 3 doors, the victim would send one of them check the room/defeat the trap (and lose some HP in the process).
  Then you get 3 new cards to replace those you played, etc… The point being to get rid of all victims before they stumble upon the exit.
  It took us more than a couple hours to refine it, think of all the parameters, fake a game on paper, and realized it was dull as is. We still think it had potential, but we didn’t see how to make it an exciting video game, so we moved on.
• concept:
  analyzing what wasn’t fun about the first idea helped shaping the next one, and we quickly knew this one was the one.
  
  
• managing ideas and time:
  we had tons of ideas for “The villain’s rules” but we made a shorter list of what had to be and could be done within 72h to get a first complete draft, and we managed to stick to it, which saved us a lot of time
• graphics:
  we decided to KISS (keep it silly and simple), which was perfect for the mood we wanted and allowed us to do small animations, so a win-win.
  
• IA:
  all the “victims” have their own personality which is pretty cool. For instance, the jock is the most popular and fastest of the team, so everyone follows his lead, unless he gets drunk, then he’s left alone (and slower). And don’t get me started on the dog !

What went wrong

• no in game tutorial
  definitly our main and stupidest mistake… lesson well learned, always leave some time for beta testing purpose !
• snap box on the smaller side, which can be extremely frustrating when you have to drop and drag the same item several times for it to “stick”
• virgin not virginal enough
  which is understandbly confusing for players (should have made her wear a white dress, it seemed so obvious afterwards)
• the goat/disappearing T-rex mini bug
  we still haven’t found what is wrong (which is annoying because we had a nice idea, but at least it doesn’t affect the game)

Post compo

Correct what went wrong, add a few items, polish everything. Also try expanding the gameplay a bit (we have different option, but we have no idea yet which one will be the funniest to play).  And if we gather enough interest, make other levels (we have tons of kooky, spooky ideas !).

BTW, if anyone is willing to beta-test the edited version let us know, it’d be nice to have someone who’s not a friend or a relative giving us his/her opinion ^^

 That’s about it, we hope you enjoyed our entry ^^

Post mortem of    coming soon ( the game is here if you want to give it a try), but just one mystery fail for now:  the goat trap.

In our game, you place various traps in your evil-haunted-mansion-in-the-woods to scare, slaughter or attract those various pestering highschool cliches:

On the web version (the only one for now), when you activate the “goat trap”, this is what happens:

(exploding goat, why not… )

While this is what we draw/animated/coded:

(obvious reference is obvious, plus T-rex make everything better anyway)
Yep, dinosaurs have disappeared from Earth and our game, and we lost half a hour not finding why this animation didn’t work ?_?

Anyway, don’t hesitate letting us know what you think of the game, we’re planning the post-compo version so feedback is very much wanted

(come on, you know you want to slaughter them ;D)

Day 1 ended (it’s 3 am here) and I can’t sleep, I’m too excited =_=;
I thought I’d say hi and post our progress, but since I’m not doing any of the programming I don’t have much to say, so it’ll have to wait until tomorrow, I guess.
In the meanwhile, here is a quick doodle I made to present our team (the game will be in a completely different style though, as you can see from our selected range of victims below ^^).

Victiiiiiiiiiiims ! ‘cos every villains need some 😀