Dungeons ‘n’ Diapers

We were pretty happy with the theme, and decided we would do a platformer game based on shadows and the imagination of a very small child. Everything else came about by exploring the basic idea of one player having two roles/worlds to interact with, in parallel.

The concept behind the game is that Zeno, a baby, sees real world objects as monsters he can fight. His imagination is reflected by shadows.

Play Dungeons ‘n’ Diapers

Tiled: our level editor of choice.

So by using the shadow warrior and interacting/attacking the other shadows, Zeno interacts with the real world, so your shadow is responsible for creating a safe path through the level. For example, a tree can be felled to bridge gaps by defeating its corresponding shadow, the skeleton.

As you can see we got some of the mechanic down, but naturally our vision entailed a lot more than we could achieve. For instance, the shadows should attack the players shadow, but they pretty much just stand there. Also, we had a ton of ideas for puzzles, and some end of level bosses… Alas we may save them for a post dare version.

Bugs

Moon walking:

During testing we found that certain key combinations caused the shadow to moon walk. Not necessarily a bug, just some missing logic in the control code. We decided to leave this in, it was kind of fun.

Earthquake:

This bug prevented you from progressing from level 1. The result can be seen in this video below:

Turns out I hadn’t cleared the data out when loading the new level, so there was an extra baby spawned just below at the old level’s start position. As the camera was set on the baby it was wildly oscillating between the two instances of the same object.

I’ve tried implementing this effect before using combinations of sine and cosine, but this is by far the best result and the simplest. I’ll be experimenting with it to see what sort of control/effects I can achieve with it.

Things that didn’t make it

• Enemy attacks/AI and more enemies in general (i.e. puppy with a wolf shadow).
• More puzzles (with ladders, light sources).
• End level boss.
• Achievements (for Moon walking).

In any case the whole thing was a massive learning experience for all of us, and as always it’s been great being part of a large collective of like minded people striving for a common goal. It’s almost like having 2500+ people over for the weekend (I don’t think there would be enough coffee).