Maybe we were influenced by Mark Brown's Game Jam (really great game design channel), maybe we are diehard fans or Sonic or maybe we felt that unifying mechanics under a single button were kind of poetic…

It doesn’t matter. The thing is that we came with the idea of a platformer that could be played using only three buttons:

1. One button (A) to move to the left. Really boring, pretty standard.

2. Another one (D) to move to the right. Again, nothing new under the sun.

3. THE BUTTON (Space) that shoots, controls gravity and, little by little, sucks the life essence from the main character.

Since the beginning, it was obvious that making the third button feel right was going to be key to the game flow (sorry for the bad joke). So we started messing with the gravity mechanic, tinkering Unity’s 2D physics variables until we reached a control system that felt good to us. It took us a good part of the first day.

In fact, in the beginning, the main character was going to float in the middle of the screen. In the end, we chose a control inspired by VVVVVV and , although our character would be able to maneuver in mid-air. This last detail really made the difference, because the feeling is more unique and, we think, more suitable for an arcade platform game. We also took inspiration from Astrorobo Sasa control.

Here is a gif from the first prototype:

From there, we got a canvas to work with. But we will talk about it in the second part: One pixel at a time

You can check Soul Gun's page here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/39/soul-gun