If you find yourself out of contest, you can access part I here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/39/soul-gun/soul-gun-post-mortem-i-a-button-to-respect

And part II here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/39/soul-gun/soul-gun-post-mortem-ii-one-pixel-at-a-time

Every wise jammer advised us to have some rest. Even go to the beach (we were in Málaga, at a big jam event). We took their advice into account, but… Well, you know… restless development is what happens when you are busy trying to follow wiser people’s advices. At least we slept the first night. About three of four hours, but we slept.

And that’s it.

The problem was that tinkering the mechanics to create a nice flow were tougher than we expected. Having invested time into the gravity control was a nice idea, but we needed to make some enemies (because the player needed something to shoot at) and some obstacles (because the player needed something to avoid while messing with gravity). That was a problem because if we had decided to focus on action we can have gotten rid of obstacles and if we had decided to focus on movement we could have gotten rid of enemies.

A lot of time passed while we were testing these enemies:

1. Ground enemies, because they force you to shoot/change gravity (also, they fall vertically when you change gravity).
2. Floating enemies, because they force you to maneuver.
3. Stationary shooting enemies, because they force to do both (and are so good to add pressure).

And even more time passed while testing these obstacles:

1. Spikes, because it allows us to direct the player and everyone understands that it's never a good idea to touch a spike (unless you are Super Sonic).
2. Boxes, because we wanted another element affected by gravity.

And after making all this stuff that has apparently nothing to do with running out of power (although I think our deprivation of sleep really fit this particular theme), the Soul Gun awakened. If the player shoots too much, it drains his/her soul, hence the title. And it solved the game’s main exploit: spamming the shooting button.

All of this was a lot of work for everyone and, in the top of that, we were forced to take a little break to return to our hostel just to pick up our stuff before they give the room to some other group of delusional people. They saved a day of cleaning.

Ok, that’s enough for now. See you in the next chapter, Unity matters.

And of course, you can check our game here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/39/soul-gun