How it all started in a hot day of summer on Gilese 581 g

– “Commander, we are approaching Earth.”

– “Good, good. Prepare the attack. I want it to be fierce, but subtle. Cruel, but gentle. Gruesome, but somewhat happy.”

– “Of course, great commander, of course. I have prepared a devious attack plan. We’ll send our invisible interceptor ships first, taking out all human aerial force. We’ll then focus on…

– “Wait, what?”

– “…I said we’ll use the invisible interceptors, the pilots are eager to start! May I send the order, may I?”

– “What are you  talking about? Invisible interceptors? You idiot! Do you know how much they cost?”

– “Well, commander… yes, but the humans…”

– “Are you stupid or what? Aerial force? Don’t you know how to conduct a successful invasion? We’ll attack from the sewers!”

–  “Excuse me, commander, but I do not see how…”

–  “Of course you don’t. You couldn’t possibly understand my genius plans! Do as I say: attack from the sewers!”

–  “Err…. very well, commander, we’ll do as you wish.”

–  “Oh, also…”

–  “Yes, commander?”

–  “Kill the girls. All of them. And nothing else. It’s part of my grand scheme.”

–  “…fine.”

So, this is roughly how the aliens’ latest Council for Earth Invasion (CEI) went. Ok, maybe these weren’t the exact words (they do speak alien after all, not english), but I think you’ve got the point. An invasion through the sewer, directly from outer space: here is where our game starts!

The game

I hereby present to you It Came From The Sewer! This is the result of my first LD 48h competition after two jams with friends, so I was a little worried about it, with all that doing everything by myself and not using any piece of previous code.

It came from the sewer. A.k.a. what happens when you leave little girls playing with fountains and WCs in the backyard.

I am more on the ‘engineer & code’ side of development (and design, too), so I was especially worried about the graphics, although I had practiced a bit with pixel art before. Still, I’m no artist.

However, I am satisfied with the result, and you can even watch the process I went thru in my timelapse here (although in a twitchy, multi-tasking and somewhat OCD-ish way) .
Without further ado, let’s get to the usual post-mortem quartet*: the good, the bad and the ugly!

CONTINUES DOWN HERE!

The good

“Nanananan abracadabra bububu!” – a girl oblivious to the alien menace

The graphics

As I said, I am no artist, but I always wanted to try out pixel art. I have been following a few tutorials, and I am really satisfied with the results so far, and also with the speed. This was also the first time I tried doing actual sprite animations, and it was really fun. Creating those sprites was so fun that I added animations I could have probably left out just for the sake of it!

To further go with the B-movie alien style, I decided to use a lot of green, orange and purple: colors that gave me that alien feeling.

The alien goes in, the alien goes out. Ahah.

For this project, I used DawnBringer’s 16 color palette. It is cool, if not even awesome, and works like a charm. You’ve got only 16 colors, but they are so wisely chosen that you can actually use a single color for many different sprites in your game and you won’t miss having more choice! Use that yellow for shading skin, or foliage, or sand, or even water… Choosing this palette was surely a good idea.

DawnBringer’s 16 color palette in all its splendor

Unity, with its new 2D options, was a great asset in helping me to create the game. Just dragging and dropping the sprites in the level was enough to get started, and that really helped in speeding up the graphics pipeline. Making animations is also really fast and easy: you just drop multiple sprites in the scene and an animation is created for you! It is more problematic to switch between animations through code, however, especially with the new mecanim animation system which does not really help for doing simple animations, but I’m sure the Unity developers will improve that as well.

 

The first level of ICFTS, easy as pie.

As a nice touch, I made sure the particle systems used a pixelated material as well, so that the particles coming out of the fountain (or of the aliens’ innards) blend well with the rest of the graphics.

A note of caution, when doing pixel art: making good drawings is just not enough, you also need to correctly import, display and animate them in the game engine, otherwise you’ll lose the pixelated aspect! I’ve seen many games using pixelated images paired with bilinear filters to enlarge them, creating a bad effect. Keep that in mind!

The sleeping
At game jams I usually try to stay awake and do as much as I can in the first day, going to bed at 4 a.m. and waking up three hours later. This is fun when there are other people around, but it is not quite so fun when I am alone. I figured that all the benefits I’d get from having more work-hours would be wasted if I was tired, so I tried a different approach.

The first day, I woke up at a good 8 A.M (due to being nervous for the jam, or I would have slept more :D), and I worked all day till around midnight. As the clock ticked the midnight, I went to bed straight away. I woke up the next day at 9.30, and I took another hour of relax before starting.

It turned out that I was quite more productive in the fewer hours I had to work, and made up for the lack of hours with that. Scrap crunching, sleeping is the way!

Plus, I really LOVE sleeping, so yeah.

 

The sound effects
It was my first time using BFXR, and I was a little bit worried that it would be useful only for actual 8-bit games. After all, the games of the SNES era used pre-sampled sounds, and BFXR generates instead them on the fly, similar to what NES era games had. Instead, I was pleasently surprised, as I think the resulting sounds are good and appropriate.

In this case, my automation engineering knowledge really helped.

What? Automation engineering? What does that have to do with sound effects? It turns out that generating sound effects is just a matter of working with wave frequency responses, which is incidentally the same thing you do when engineering the control system of a robotic arm. Cut-off filters, amplifications, phasers, oscillations… these are concepts that are shared by both fields, and if you understand them in one, you can re-use that knowledge in the other. Knowing what happens when you change a slider in BFXR really speeds up the process and lets you achieve effects that would have been very hard with just randomly pressing buttons.An example could be the laughter of the girls when they are happy.

So, if you have studied a bit of control systems, get a shot with BFXR and see what you can do!

Look at all these robotic arms! Don’t they look cool? They sound like noisy musical instruments, if you try to listen. Like a badly tuned distorted guitar!

The code highlights

I rushed the coding part, since I had already experience with it. The mechanics were not hard to implement at all (no physics nor collisions made me happy) and the bulk of the effort was on figuring out how to implement the new design aspects. Code organization was straightforward, with a main game controller handling everything else, a grid code to handle the pipes and the aliens and girls having their own controllers.

Since I didn’t have enough time to do them by hand, I made all the levels random and just changed the seed, stopping and saving the seed when I found something cool. This was a good approach and easy to code, and I think I’ll use it again in the future.

 

The bad

“They’re coming outta the fucking WC!” – a girl that shouldn’t use those bad words

 

The rushed design

As much as I love inventing and designing (surely) weird and (hopefully) innovative games, this time I didn’t spend a lot of hours thinking about the concept.
Instead of focusing on finding a concept that would really click with me, I told to myself: “Michele (no, I’m not a woman. It’s an Italian name), I have an idea: you’ll take one of the first funny ideas that will come to mind and focus on its presentation, this time!”.

I followed my own advice, looking for the first funny, stupid idea: aliens from the sewers.

Needless to say, I didn’t resist the urge to take a few well known mechanics and mix and match them (I cannot seem to be able to limit to one mechanic :P). I chose two: tile-rotating and zerg-rushing (if you can call that a mechanic!).
However, this was not the best course of action, especially since I had decided to not allocated a lot of time to the design.

This. This is fun. Watching aliens eat people is fun. I’m on the right track!

Well, it didn’t turn out to be a really good idea. I didn’t spend enough time to refine the game design concept, and mixing tile-rotating and zerg-rushing was not so straightforward.

Remember, people: if you want to do an original design, you need a lot of time to perfect it. If you don’t have time for that, just make a random runner, people always love those. 😉 If you are in any way similar to me,  you will probably disregard this advice and try something original. After all, we are full of runners! Screw runners! Let’s try some weird mix of strategy, platforming and puzzle!!! I know I will repeat this error the next time. Life is too short to not try out weird mechanics synergies.

Ahhhh… a white, clean, porcelain WC in the open, it’s a dream come true!

The design was larger than expected and I found myself having to find solutions to many problems. How would the aliens move? At what speed? Where would they go when stopping? Do they idle? Can they go back? What if two aliens meet? What if an alien gets into a spawner (ehehehhe)? What if you rotate a tile with an alien it (for this one I did find a good solution, killing the aliens that were moving)? How would they attack? When? How many hits to kill? How do you win? How do you lose? Too many questions for so little time!

The funny thing is: I didn’t think it would be an original design and so I thought I’d have an easier time: I just took two random mechanic and added them together. I guess it’s not that simple, if you don’t have a reference game that already solved the small design issues. You know what they say, ‘the sum is greater than the parts’. That works also for complexity!

The problem appears already in level 2, as the spawner on the right is outright useless, and would be even if it wasn’t blocked!

Should I have dedicated more time to the design? Probably, yes. But I still had a blast with pixelating and sound and music making, so I’m happy anyway. I’ll surely try to better the design now, however, and many ideas have already come to mind. What if the multiple spawners must be used together, creating merged giga-rat aliens? What if the girls counterattacked? What if the pipes changed during the level? What if… you were the last alien on the planet and you made friends with a girl (disney drama, always works)?

 

 

The ugly

“Please, mr. doggy alien, don’t hurt me!” – a girl that is starting to learn what pain is.

The level design
I spent the last two hours of development making levels and testing them, using the randomization code I’ve written earlier about. The result is somewhat okaish, but it doesn’t keep up with hand-made level design. Also, the spamming really made it hard to create interesting levels. Note to self: next time spend more time to perfect the design, so the levels will be easier to create!

The timelapse
First time doing it…. and I took a shot every minute. I thought the result would be great. The result was CRAP. It looks like I have OCD (and I do, but that’s another story) and that I cannot focus on a single task (which I do too). Note to self: next time take a damn screenshot every second or so.

 

Bonus: the tidbits

Did I write ‘quartet’ in the introduction? Yeah, I did. Since I’m in a good mood right now, I decided to write a bit more for the knowledge-thirsty, letter-chewing readers (I know there must be at least a couple of you out there).
So, here are some random tidbits about the development of the game:

– I wanted to make the music sound alien, while also being funny and good for this kind of puzzle game. I did that by adding those semi-random notes played using a bottle flute with a phaser effect: my goal was to recreate something akin to what you hear in XCOM when aliens appear, and thus achieve that B-movie effect! I hope it turned out fine.

– Can you guess from which old game I took inspiration for creating the title? Here is a hint:

I live in colonies, but not in space. I love my queen, and know my place. Who am I?

 – “Killing small girls with aliens? That’s so cruel!” is one of the feedbacks I got about the game. But how did it turn out to be little girls? This is a funny story.

You see, at the beginning it should have been random people being killed (and indeed the girls’ sprite filename is Dude.xfc), but then, on Saturday, some parents decided to come by, bringing with them a shrieking small nephew. Needless to say, that killed my workflow focus for a few hours, and it seems the shrieks quietly (or not so quietly) made their way into the game itself!

In addition, I didn’t want to draw the whole clothes of the girl (drawing aliens is funnier!), so I left her with that long robe, which makes her look more like a small girl.

So, this is why there are small girls instead of dudes. Have fun eating them!

Closing words

Well, it was a good weekend of creative work, and good to take my mind off of the usual work. Also, I now have another small game to add to my portfolio, which is always good, isn’t it?

I hope my words were useful to you, in some way. If you have any feedback, feel free to comment!

See you next time! And also…

Play and rate!