Now that some time has passed since Compo deadline, and that I have/am giving myself some time to myself, my mind’s a bit clearer to reflect on my submission, Eat Champ.

action! tragedy! romance!

Although I did have a lot of fun making it, I have mixed feelings on the final result; on one hand, to make the deadline I had to cut a lot of corners, leave out a lot of polish, and ultimately submit the game in a barely-finished state. Despite that, I’m still happy with the concept I wound up choosing, and the fact that I was able to stick to it until the end without it becoming a completely buggy mess is something I can be proud of, at least for my first LD! It’s also MUCH more playable than my previous (and first) game jam submission made some time ago (link if you’re curious), so I do feel that I’ve grown since then.

I’d like to spend a bit of time talking about the choice I made during development; for as crude as the game is, I actually did put a lot of thought into things! Even if the protagonist looks like this:

what a hottie

–GAMEPLAY STYLE–
Right from the get-go, I wanted to avoid making a game with level navigation. In order for that kind of game to be fun, it needs solid mechanics AND good level design. I learned the hard way during my first jam that getting mechanics down is hard enough, and this time I didn’t want to have to worry about rushing to create levels to properly express my game’s mechanics. I only wanted to have one thing to worry about: keeping the mechanics fun, and to have them at the forefront of the game.

Another thing about games with level navigation is that they’re only as long as how many levels they have. With that in mind, I opted for a arcade-style gameplay, which naturally gives itself high longevity without much extra development effort. As much as I like games with levels, I knew that if I did make one, it would have been really short. I also hoped that a mechanic-oriented game wouldn’t be as hurt by time-saving cuts, since as long as the basics are down, the game can still be playable without having to be fancy or complex.

I think the style of game I wound up choosing, a “multitasking” game (I’m not sure if this style of game has an official name, but that’s what I’m calling it), accomplished those goals well enough. But remember how I just said I wanted a game that would be fun with just the basics? Apparently, I didn’t, because the “basics” of my game were several interdependent actions working together in tandem (managing eating/chewing with lung & belly capacity, etc etc). This meant that even putting one “action” in the game meant that I had to prepare every other action that depended on it, which made things tricky to finish in a timely manner. I still think keeping the actions dependent on another is an important part to the game, but next time I’ll avoid designing a game like that to allow for more modular development that can be taken one step at a time.

–FLASHPUNK–
If I had made this game a year or two ago, I would have used pure Actionscript 3 in tandem with Flash Professional. Lately, though, I’ve tried to branch out to using game-oriented frameworks, and fell in love with FlashPunk (for the most part). I feel its best for tile-oriented games, but I still used it to make this one because of its high performance and how it saves time on tasks that can get annoying in pure AS3.

With that said, using it made me realize all of the things I take for granted when using AS3+Flash, like being able to animate a movie clip/entity in Flash and import it to my game. FlashPunk uses spritesheets instead of Flash symbols, so to get all of my Flash-drawn assets in (it’s a great drawing tool) I had to use a sprite-sheet generator (grapefrukt exporter) on everything. This was okay for the most part (and for the player’s head and hands, was actually better), but drawing and positioning status bars and everything was a bit tricky without feeling as closely connected to the display stage as I do with AS3. Most of those difficulties were due to inexperience, though, and working in an unfamiliar (but still effective) environment was a great learning experience that gave me a good idea of what I need to learn to make things easier for myself down the road.

–PRESENTATION–
There isn’t much to say here…I made some placeholder graphics, and they wound up being the final ones! How embarrassing. I was saving the task of better visuals & sounds for last, which I suppose was the right choice since those are the most expendable parts of a rapidly-developed game. But it still would have been nice if I gave myself a little bit of time making the game less ugly (I have to defend my decision to use floating hands, though, which is the go-to method to easily & effectively animate hand movement).

I did try to do a good job on the status meters, as I knew if I cheaped out on those no one would be able to tell that they were supposed to represent a digestive system. I also made sure to put key prompts in, and to provide visual feedback (usually by making things flash) when it was warranted to direct attention or inform the user that pressing a key did something (like digesting), or to differentiate similar-looking actions from each other (biting fills your mouth with food, but chewing doesn’t, so I did my best to animate the teeth differently for each action so players can tell the two apart. Did I accomplish that?).

So the effort I spent towards presentation was to help prevent the game from being too cryptic to play, which is nice and all, but I still think it’s confusing to play without reading the instructions beforehand. For instance, I insisted on assigning the “breathe in” action to pressing P and Q at the same time, and to forbid it while out of air if your mouth is full of food, but I didn’t give myself time to explain those rules visually as well as I did others. Especially since the game’s presentation doesn’t immediately liken it to a set of conventions (like a platformer), it was my job to properly express how to play it, and I failed to do a consistent job of that. But at least I did a better job of it then for my last game, though, which was even worse in that regard (hey, I guess I learned more than I thought from that game, heh).

–CUTS–
I’ll keep this part quick. It’s probably clear that there were supposed to be many more features/actions to the game, as it’s a bit simple the way it is now. Of course, by mid-afternoon on Sunday I started to get the feeling that I would have to start making some cuts (I really thought I was going to be okay for time until right about then). I never thought that I had too much planned to put in the game, but it’s surprising what a time limit can do to you! So I did what I could to finish only what I needed to keep the game playable. I also didn’t give myself time to properly balance the difficulty of what I had put in, so I’m sorry that the game is so hard. 😛 The lesson learned here is that it’s best to start simple and build from there, rather than having even moderately-sized plans that will likely end up cut.

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Also, those who have played the game probably raised an eyebrow while noticing that it’s currently hosted as a file dump, rather on its own page or as a game portal submission. To be perfectly honest, I’m not all that comfortable submitting it to a public portal in its current stage; unless its understood as being a hastily-made LD submission, it’s really not ready for public consumption, and I think it would do me more harm than good. With that said, I fully intend to release an upgraded version of the game within the next few days (hopefully over the weekend [EDIT: haha yeah right], when LD buzz is still hot!!), while keeping the original version in it as “48-hour mode” or something, for context. It’ll probably be just an audio/visual update, but if I have time I might even add in some cut features!

So thanks for playing, and thanks to anyone who read all the way to the end of this rambling mess! I do what I do for folks like you. <3

PS: I will probably be **STREAMING** some submission surfing soon. I'll make another blog post about it, so sit tight! Because I know you all care immensely!!