Before We Begin...

For the full story of Artax, I have to go back to Ludum Dare 38. Back then we made a game called Little Fortune Planet - a peculiar global physics simulation that pretended to be a card game. It was a fun process, and a lot more experimental than our previous entries, but at the end we had to ask ourselves: ”Is this really a game?” We ended up making a post-LD full sandbox version that dropped the card mechanic altogether as well. “Next time we'll make something more traditional,” we said. And we did.

What Is Artax?

Artax is a more traditional puzzle platformer in which you escort a large robot with chronic power depletion syndrome. In return, he protects you from nasty critters, provides you with a mobile platform and smashes through doors you cannot otherwise open. The game is named after a character from an 80s movie, because of foreshadowing. There is also a trailer video.

Evoking Emotion

The original idea in our document was this: Emotional robot guardian game - Robot is big. Needs power. Helps you. Squish bad things. - Player helps the robot guardian survive, but depends on robot’s prowess and is weak himself. - Robot acts as scaffolding to get to other platforms. - Emotional dialogue. - Solar powered or battery powered? You’ll notice the emotional dialogue bulletpoint. We wanted the player to bond with the robot, but somewhere along the line we decided against written dialogue. @daanvanyperen did a great job planning the emote word-bubbles and requesting specific animations from me, and the interactions during the game in combination with the final “cutscene” at the end resulted in what I feel is a successfully bittersweet little narrative.

We have a full playthrough of the game on youtube that @meatmachine made, so if you just want to watch rather than face the challenge, now you can.

My Pixelart Goals

I was looking forward to making 2D movement animations, given what I had learned the past months from various pixelart tutorials by Saint11 and Sandy Gordon. I’m really happy with how my animations ended up, and had a blast just moving around. Of course, the robot required a lot of animations as well, and while I could re-use and edit a lot of frames I had already made for new actions, this probably took the most time.

My final tilesheet contained 75 robot animation frames and 84 player animation frames, though the player was really three sets of the same 28 frames with slight edits for the two batteries they can hold. My greatest failing in this tileset was the poorly animated water. If we do a post-jam version of the game, that's one thing I will definitely try to fix. I made a pixelart timelapse video of the whole process.

Failures

• The game seems to be too challenging for many players. A lot of people don't get to access the more emotional narrative segment at the end of the game.
• After the initial brainstorming phase we took a more freeform road to development that eventually led to some misunderstandings in our team, which resulted in some frustrations. This isn’t a true failure as we recognised what happened and worked everything out, but clearer communication on our workflow could have helped there.

Successes

• We managed to get a lot done. I've never animated this many frames for a project before, we have six pre-built levels, five individual songs in our soundtrack, and a game that feels pretty complete.
• As we all started our own processes at the same time, we had (parts of) a soundtrack before I had produced any graphics at all. Either luckily or through having figured out a clear vision for the game during our brainstorm, we all felt that the audio met the visual.
• The feedback we’ve been getting has generally been very positive, and with nearly 80 ratings there's been quite a lot of it. It’s difficult to be objective about your own game, but I feel that we got a good amount of quality of work to go along with our quantity of work.

Participate again next time?

Yes!

Credits

• @daanvanyperen | coding | twitter, github, website
• @flaterectomy | graphics | twitter, soundcloud, website
• @meatmachine | music & audio, level design | twitter, soundcloud