00Boyfriend Post-Mortem
If you haven't had the chance to play 00Boyfriend, our action-platform shooter dating-sim hybrid, check it out and rate/comment! We are pretty excited with how it turned out!
Game Description
The spy dating scene is a pretty rough place. Agent Doug Smoulders is a big chin wielding, lovable secret agent seeking companionship in this modern dating simulator. Keep up on text conversations with love interests during secret missions or your heart(s) will suffer the consequences.
Tristan created five amazing original songs for this jam!
The team!
Code: Patrick Hill / Aron Hommas
Art: Sam Bragg
Music: Tristan Deniet
Sound design: Patrick Hill / Tristan Deniet
Script: Aron Hommas / Ava Correa / Amy W
Theme
Alright, now to the meat of things.
We struggled for a while to land on a concept we felt worked well and was something we hadn't seen before. After the theme release we spent a good 3 hours coming up with different ideas. How do we make an incompatible game compatible, but not too compatible that it kills the theme! We got out some cards and wrote a bunch of genres down, mixing and matching and thinking of ideas with the combinations. I (Patrick), had been wanting to do some sort of shooter in previous jams. I just find the gameplay to be fun and engaging and hadn't had the chance to throw one together yet. So we started spitballing some ideas about combining a shoot-em-up with another genre. We thought a lot about different sports games, variations of basketball and football, and even had an idea about taking curling to an extreme. But someone suggested a dating simulator and things really started rolling. We came up with the idea that you had to answer your phone to respond to messages but the phone was super distracting to toy with the theme of incompatibility. What was more incompatible than a fast paced shooter where you have to follow dialogue and respond to silly questions?
Thematically we went through a few ideas. One of the first ideas was a scene set in "The Purge" where the protagonist made a date on the night of the purge unintentionally. The level would have had your date following along while mayhem occured. However, we wanted to keep things a little more straight forward. A spy came to mind, secluded on his mission and secluded in his love life. Once we landed on the concept, we all thought it would be pretty rad if we could pull it off!
Development
Friday
Coming up with the theme took up a good chunk of time, but allowed us to really hone in on a vision of the final product. We all met up together to start off the jam like a little LAN party. We started work on getting the character designed and general art style. Doug originally had a fedora and looked quite noire, but we decided having his face showing would be more appropriate for a dating-sim. So we featured his big chin! Tristan worked away on the main music theme taking influence from popular spy films and got something cool going pretty quickly. Aron and I decided to split the programming duties between the phone and everything else. Aron took on the challenge of the phone and I got to work building up the project.
Saturday 
This was our work from home day. Each of us got to grinding on our respective assignments. I managed to get all of the menus, platform mechanics, shooting, weapons, and some of the enemies mostly completed. Level design was one of the hardest parts for me because it is just so open ended! I managed to get the first level blocked out and tested. I wanted to give the feel of our spy moving through different office buildings and across rooftops.
Sam was able to get out the main character, baddies and animations done along with some tiles for the first level. He also pumped out the logo and various titles in game in a cohesive style. I was incharge of compiling the project, so I worked pretty closely with Sam to implement all of the art assets and get them looking right in game.
Aron worked on the phone gameplay, building an event system to handle various inputs and spit out responses. He worked hard on getting the phone to be responsive and distracting, but also a clear design with how the inputs are received and messages are displayed. It turned out really cool! He basically built a text messaging app for the game!!
Tristan had some prior commitments for most of the day but was able to come up with a couple cool ideas for unique sounding compositions. We really wanted to have a strong spy theme for the menus, which he killed on Friday! But we wanted to branch out a bit for the other songs, throwing in some playful vibes on the first level, sneaky vibes on the second level, and intense action vibes on the final level.
Sunday 
We got a lot of work done on Saturday, but we needed to touch base on our parts and get things glued together. Later in the day we met up at different points and talked over some mechanics and systems. Originally we wanted the phone conversations to have some sort of point based system with each response adding or subtracting from your relationship score. It became apparent that to keep it balanced and obvious to the player it would be pretty challenging with the time constraints. Ultimately we came up with the idea to tie the phone gameplay into the player's health system. I had made some health pickups and other things for healing up on the mission, but decided to scrap them in favor of the new system. I think it turned out pretty well overall! A little more game-juice would have been helpful to really portray what your phone conversation did to your hearts, but we needed to get things done!
Once we got the phone gameplay implemented to the project (thankyou github <3) it was a really cool moment. Up until that point it was in the air whether this game would be fun or disjointed. But man, it was hype! The phone animations and responsiveness really made it for a cool experience juggling the different genres.
My responsibilities also included sound effects. Sound design can be very labor intensive for completely synthetic sounds, so I decided to keep the aesthetic more realistic. I dug through my sound libraries finding a lot of classic sounds like footsteps and gunshots. After finding a base layer I would work with cutting various parts together, pitch shifting and tuning. I also really wanted some punchy sounds for the weapons. I added a few layers of different sounds on top like a thuddy kick drum sample and some clicky mechanical noises or trails to add some umph. I made the rocket launcher shooting sfx with a sound of a trunk closing, a deep drum hit, and parts of a recorded rocket launch! But then I had to make 2 more sounds for the rocket flying (rocket launch/bottle rocket pitched down) and the explosion(car door closing/explosion recordings/effects). I had to work fast, so I would go back and forth between sound designing and implementing art and features while debugging simultaneously. It was a ton of work!
Sam was over at my place working on art assets the whole time and we had our significant others help out with writing some of the text scripts with Aron while he was over. They also were very kind to get us some chinese takeout to fuel the jam! Also shout out to coffee, couldn't have done this without you. Tristan came over later and checked out the progress on the game and talked over some of the sound design and music. Tristan was able to work on the phone sound effects and get some tonal synthetic sounds going. We needed a notification sound(with phone buzz) as well as positive, neutral, and negative feedback sounds.
Monday 
Crunch time is on!!!! I didn't sleep from Sunday 9am to Monday 9pm a good 36 hours xD. Sam was a trooper and managed to stay up til 5am or so working with me on getting various backgrounds, props, and animations up. Aron got to plugging away on inputting the text scripts and coming up with more content. My biggest task was getting the phone gameplay implemented and the levels built. I also needed to give the game an ending and implement various systems for tracking weapon progression, debugging and implementing sound and music, tuning up enemy AI behaviors and really just compiling the entire project. It was a struggle towards the end, my brain was mushy (coffee bless)!
I also had to work Monday afternoon but had a lot of downtime to finish things up. I work with Tristan and on Monday he came to me with an idea for a bit of a gag at the end of the game. It's a really funny country song about being a spy in the dating scene. I was all for it, so after Tristan got home he was able to record and sing on the last song. I finished up the jam by adding some various background props, play testing, fixing a couple bugs and adding a polish effects like dust particles, blood effects, enemy deaths, and a long list of other details.
Wrap up 
I'm really proud of what we accomplished in this 72 hours! This was my third game jam with Sam and Tristan and first time working with Aron. His contribution of the phone gameplay was amazing! He also made source control a breeze with his github knowledge. Special thanks to Ava and Amy for keeping us alive during the long hours. I really hope everyone enjoys the game, I think we made something pretty unique and very fun to play. If you get a good chuckle and have some fun, this jam was a success!
Cheers!