In this post, I'll talk about the development of POKKO and how it's received.

What is POKKO?

POKKO is a short puzzle-platformer game, made by 4 people. You control a boy who is stuck in a Game Boy game. When you collect a Game Boy, a clone of you gets spawned, who repeats your past actions. You need to use him to solve the puzzles.

POKKO is currently played by 1857 players. It's available for WebGL, Windows, Mac, Linux.

How it started?

I'm a member of a Turkish game development community, called ÜNOG. It has a Discord server and channels dedicated to Ludum Dare. I'm a programmer and designer, I was looking for a team of visual artists and musicians. One of POKKO's artists, Deniz Eryılmaz, was also looking for people to work with, he shared his portfolio in ÜNOG's channel and I thought "I must work with him!". Thankfully, he also chose me to work together. He also mentioned his friends who we could work together; another 2D artist (Emir Çetinkaya) and a musician (Kağan Morkoç). I loved their portfolio, too, I am glad that they joined our team.

The tools we used

Unity 2019, Visual Studio 2017, Aseprite, FL Studio

The idea

We had wanted to make a pixel art game. After the theme was announced, we came up with the idea of a boy who is stuck in a Game Boy game. A clone of boy would get summoned when we collected a Game Boy. I offered a time limit to the game after the clone gets summoned, because the computer's (browser's, to be exact) memory could not be sufficient to keep an infinite number of player positions. Also, this time limit could make the game more enjoyable.

What went right:

• People loved the visuals of the game. I think visuals are the strongest part of POKKO.
• The visuals and sounds could be completed in time. In fact, there are some sprites and a cutscene that we haven't used in the game. The artists created a cutscene which would play on game over, but I thought it would be annoying if a cutscene played each time we failed.
• I could program the game good enough to be released as a Ludum Dare game.
• Clone system works fine. Technical details: Player's positions get stored in a Vector3 list at each fixed update. The clone's position is set to those values in his own fixed update.
• People liked the twist at the game's end, which fits to the theme of LD47.

What went wrong:

• There are some problems with the coding of the game. The protagonist can't jump if he's standing on his clone and the clone is jumping, for example. I had made some platform games in the past and used the same techniques, but those games weren't complex enough. I couldn't find time to fix the game's controls even after the jam ended.
• Apparently the idea of summoning clones is not unique to POKKO. I have seen about 3 Ludum Dare 47 games that use similar mechanics. There is also The Company of Myself.
• I used Unity's own video system for the cutscene. It didn't work on WebGL and Linux the first time I tried. I had to spend some time on it.
• I couldn't find time to create more levels, as I was working on making video work in WebGL.
• Pixel perfect camera caused some problems, the game didn't run correctly on 1366x768 resolution. It turned out that I had to make some settings.

Conclusion

I'm really glad with the game we created. I just wish I could program better platform mechanics. I expect a good rating on Visuals and Audio categories.