Squishies contains quite some things I never tried before! It was an interesting compo for me so I decided to document the process.

The theme and brainstorming!

For me the theme was announced at 3 AM. I woke up at 7 AM, full of energy to start!

"Your life is currency". Hmmm... what to make with that? Like last Ludum Dare, I found the theme quite hard. I don't mind though, it forces me to think of completely new game concepts. I don't want to make just any type of game though... As usual, next to the theme, I had some restrictions of my own:

• I wanted to make the main characters really cute. I never made a game with cute characters before and it sounded like a fun challenge.
• I didn't want to work with Health Points (HP) or any other kind of number. It might feel like a strange restriction, but I didn't want the player to constantly have to look at the HP bar to play the game. I wanted him to look at the actual gameplay, levels and graphics, whatever those would become. In general I simply like to avoid UI in games whenever possible.

Cute characters is still ok as a restriction. Not having any kind of life points is a lot harder with a theme like "your life is currency". Uh...

I started brainstorming.

One of the first ideas that came to minds was: "You are a bunch of cute characters with abilities". Cute, check. Each character could only use the ability once and "died" after that? Theme, check. No HP bar, check. You just need enough cute characters for the player to use, really. :smiley:

But what would the gameplay be? The above idea did not really limit gameplay options. It could still become almost anything. It could be some kind of "war game" where you have two camps? On the paper I used for brainstorming I had "Tower Defense", "protection mechanisms" but also "shape-shifting eggs" :smile: written down. I was thinking of some kind of civilization of "blobs" where the player would be a god. I thought of "infinite runner" with a whole bunch of cute characters. Anyway, as crazy as it sounds I actually liked the idea with the "shape-shifting eggs". Maybe they could transform into a gaint fluffy block which you can use to continue in the level? With those blocks, the game could become a nice "puzzle platformer game".

I decided to go with that idea.

Having a puzzle platformer with a lot of cute characters would be hard though. How to control them? You cannot control all of them with the keyboard. Maybe I could just select a bunch and point them where to go? That would mean they would need platformer pathfinding and some AI which could jump those platforms... I don't think I have ever seen something like that before. It could be something fun to try though.

Below some quick scribbles during brainstorming... In the beginning the squishies had feet! Also, in the image below the shape-shifting "eggs" became square! :smiley: There is also the word "hopping" as an idea for movement and a big "Squishy".

I was also thinking of making it physics based. It could be fun to see the characters tumble over each other. That would make the AI part even harder though...

Time to upgrade Unity?

It is 8:30 AM now and I just started my computer. I wasn't very well prepared for this Ludum Dare. I had been thinking of streaming the development but I did not prepare that. Instead I downloaded some simple screen recording software "Chronolapse" which I had seen somewhere on this site. I also wanted to try out the new Shader Graph in Unity so I started downloading the new version.

Downloading the new version of Unity during the jam was not a very smart decision. It also did not help that my hard drive was full. I ended up not being able to use it at all because it gave some strange error message when starting up. Luckily, I still had Unity 2018.3 installed so I used that one, but I definitely lost some valuable time. Hmmm...

Art!

While Unity was still downloading I wanted to start with the art (9 AM now). First, I spent around 40 minutes looking for references (work of other artists) on the internet and deciding on a color palette. I am using a tool to keep those reference images on the screen called Kuadro Beta (0.8.5) and to draw I am using a wacom bamboo mte-450a pen tablet (so an old model, but it still works).

After that I opened Krita (2.8) and starting painting. The whole process you see below took a bit more than an hour.

New Unity Project & Time to upgrade Krita?

Still using the older version of Unity, I started importing the "blob" into Unity (11 AM). I wanted to import all layer groups from Krita separately so I had more control. However, apparently my version of Krita was too old and it did not support exporting all layer groups separately. I could export all layers manually, but if I wanted to draw other things I would have to do that for those as well. So, of course I started upgrading Krita... :slightsmile: I don't learn, do I? :sweatsmile: This upgrade ended up going well though...

I wanted to make the blobs a bit ... err ... squishy. I thought it could be fun to have them stretch and get squished together on impact.

To be continued...

Since this post is already getting long and I didn't even start with the squishiness, hair simulation, path finding and AI, I will split up the "origin story of Squishies" in a couple of posts. Stay tuned for more!

In case you are interested, you can play it here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/squishies