I've done LD twice before, and had a great time, but ran right up against the 72 hour limit for a Jam entry both times despite initially trying to do a Compo entry. This time I was absolutely determined to get into Compo, and I just barely managed it! Up front, do be aware that if you play my game, it may not run great on older machines (like anything worse than a GTX 970 and mid-range CPU from the same era). Bullet hell type games made in Godot require some optimization to run well, and I just didn't have time for that.

I really wanted to keep it simple this time, so I went into the jam planning to make a twin stick shooter, and I was going to adapt that to whatever the theme would be. I figured a lot of people would be making watery or spelunking type games for "depth", so I decided to go a different direction and make it aerial depth--so "Altitudes" was the obvious title. That decided, the next obvious thing, being a twin stick shooter, was to make it an airplane game--but what kind of airplanes? I grew up obsessed with WW2-era aircraft, and that was the kind of specificity I needed, so I immediately settled on that.

My process for these jams is always to start with one big mockup image with a bunch of layers containing most of the pixel art I will need for the game. I don't want to have to interrupt my coding flow too often later to go back and make art. In this case, I utilized reference images of various WW2 fighters and bombers to come up with some "inspired by" designs--nothing 1:1 with the real world, since I had gameplay concerns to think about and this wasn't exactly going to be a realistic sim, but for those curious, my designs were loosely based on the Supermarine Spitfire, the Boulton Defiant, the Messerschmitt Bf 110, and the Henschel Hs 130.

I really wished I would have had time to do some kind of water effect, and to add more detail to the sprites and background, because that would have really enhanced the game, but I just ran out of time to do visual polish.

As far as gameplay goes, my concept here was inspired a little bit by Ikaruga's polarity system--what if you have to swap between two layers to fight bad guys, and for good measure, how about a third just for picking up loot? A number of players have commented they find this frustrating, but overall I'm fairly happy with how it turned out. It brings in something I repeatedly come back to in my game design career--the idea of multitasking, of juggling different tasks. It's one of my favorite things to add to gameplay because it adds another layer of complexity that increases the game's skill ceiling.

The biggest design challenge for this game was how to make it clear which layer the player was on--what altitude their plane is at. It was immediately clear that just having a layer of floating clouds in the middle and changing the scale of the player and enemies wasn't going to be good enough, so I added a blur shader to all of the sprites in the game and changed the level of blur based upon which layer the player was on--so their layer would always be clear, while other layers would be blurry. This I think was good enough to at least make the game work. I don't love using these kinds of shaders on pixel art, and it's still a little bit of a clunky game mechanic, in my opinion, but I think it ended up being playable and, at least for me, decently fun.

I was also determined to include some kind of random player advancement system. For that, you get a "pick three" shop in between waves and random crates that drop into the ocean from destroyed planes above. Collect money, buy upgrades. I wish I could have included more rewarding visual/audio feedback to the player completing a wave and buying things in the shop, but again, I just ran out of time. It all functions though, which considering it was all implemented in the last five hours before the deadline, I think is pretty insane.

The music is just a midi file I quickly wrote in the last hour or so and rendered into game audio. Bass and percussion, all you really need for quick-and-dirty BGM like this.

The sound effects were fun--running around with my phone banging on stuff with an old metal towel bar I had laying around from the last move, then bringing it into Audacity and massaging it with a bunch of static and effects. I'm surprised at how well I was able to create a reasonable facsimile of gun sound effects. The money sound effect is just me jingling some change. The rest of the sounds are just playing around with white and brown noise--amazing what you can do with those and some audio effects.

All an all, it was exhausting, but I'm proud of what I accomplished!