So, after a cooldown from the 72h marathon, we’re here to talk about the good ol’ “The Good, The Bad and The Ugly”, in reverse order.

Our little blue Clint Eastwood wannabe had some hard times crossing balconies, which probably caused some headaches, not to mention causing many unnecessary deaths. We considered this an extremely pernicious bug, because it’s already very hard to be the fastest gun in the west in our game, we don’t need platforms acting randomly to add insult to injury. So we took the liberty of fixing that and re-submitting.

The biggest of the bads was too much ambition in our initial plan. Furthermore, we only realized too late that our first idea wasn’t going to be able to be completed. So we had to rush through several important phases, which resulted in our controls not being as good as we wished. Some tasks took longer than planned, notably getting the assets into the game properly, working all the different animations and state machines took way longer than expected, leaving less time for fine-tuning the gameplay with the controls and AI. This is really dangerous in a fast-paced game like ours. We had some problems with downscaling assets as well.

Ah, at last, the good! We managed to come up with a game that was really satisfying to us. Using ToonBoom for animations was incredible! Cheers for our artists, they were amazing. Procedural level generation proved to be well worth the time invested, it added quite a twist to the game. The mixing of 2D with 3D also turned out very pleasant! We also scored lucky with some hasted decisions. The most fortunate was the ricocheting bullets, which wasn’t planned for initially, but once we saw it happening, we exploited that to it that work as an integral part of the game mechanic.

Overall we are very pleased with the result and, most importantly, we had a good deal of fun and learned a lot developing this game in those grueling 72 hours. In the end we had to bite the bullet, fatal as they are!

We are also very excited and have been working on the game, soon we plan on posting a post-compo, we already have some nifty little features working (did I hear someone say bullet time?)…