..continued from Part 1

5. Hacky collision fixing + hacky things in general

I had a lot of trouble with collision detection since the two shoes I used were pretty oddly shaped and had some transparent areas that detected as false hits. As far as I know, the basic arcade physics mode in Phaser only supports a single collider per sprite that is either a rectangle or a circle. Neither of those worked too well for my long and oddly curved shoe sprites. I was hoping to find a pixel perfect collider or a good solution to the problem but I couldn't find one.

There is a P2 physics mode that uses more advanced polygon colliders, but I didn't want to sink more time into learning it and possibly breaking something else after already sinking quite a bit of time into research and trying out things that didn't work. I ended up writing a really dirty secondary collision filter to reject collisions based on a bunch of x,y coordinates and a switch statement. Probably spent 2 hours on this problem alone, but the quick hacky solution took about 15 minutes more and solved the problem to "just about good enough" level.

There were other places where I saved some time by using kind of sloppy coding practices such as attaching arbitrary properties to sprites to keep track of things - things that I wouldn't let myself do for normal production code but I allowed myself to do because game jam! It kinda felt good in the way that getting away with something harmless but a little naughty feels good. It was a little cathartic too.

6. Passions Awakened

Probably the biggest thing that went right is that now I'm excited about making another game in the future and learning new game systems like Unity. This is easily the biggest win for me!

# What Went Wrong:

1. Wanting to make my own assets

One of the rules of the 48 hour compo that is not part of the 72 hour game jam is that you have to create all your own assets instead of just using freely available ones. I had originally hoped I'd be able to create all my own assets, but in the end it would have been just too time consuming. I think the first few I picked up, I was hoping to use as placeholders and then replace eventually but there wasn't time to do that! Maybe in an even simpler future game, or if I get more proficient at graphics work.

2. Not including buildings

I originally wanted to create buildings hazards and things you had to avoid stomping on, but I wasn't able to get that done. I was thinking about using a tileset with buildings, but I couldn't find a set I really liked. I would also have had to implement collision detection with specific tiles and add destructive terrain. All this would have taken a lot more time.

In the end, I found a kind of simple flat 2D tile set from James Arndt that featured some streets and grass. I did a little bit of image processing and rotation to get them into a Tiled compatible format. Since they were so simple, it was pretty easy to spend a few minutes laying out a very, very basic map.

I thought I could add some buildings later on, but didn't have the chance. I decided to just leave it as is and concentrate on the mechanic of avoiding tiny humans. However, since there were no other obstacles, I had to greatly inflate the number of random people wandering around on the map.

I kind of wish I had spent a little more time laying out the map and making it look more like a city. I also wish that I had added a few more buildings and things so it wasn't just an empty lot with a bunch of people wandering aimlessly!

3. Kind of a gross feeling game

I originally wanted to make this kind of a friendly and funny game. The original working title was 'Gentle Giant' and the point is to NOT step on people. My original mental pitch described it as sort of a reverse 'Rampage' where you try not to destroy stuff.

I think it didn't dawn on me that I needed to have something happen visually when you stepped on people in the early stages. I ended using the blood pool because it was a strong visual indicator that something bad had happened. Later, when I was debugging collision detection, I wanted to make sure the blood pools were spawning in the same places as where the people sprites were getting stepped on, I 'froze' the people sprites in place instead of removing them from the game. I kinda liked the way that looked, so I decided to leave 'bodies' in. Finally I wanted a font to match the game a bit and I ended up going with a drippy bitmap font.

When I got to the end of everything, I took a step back and looked at it and though "this doesn't feel good to me at all". I think there's certainly a place for kind of gorey stuff in videos games, but it's not necessarily the kind of game I wanted to make. Hopefully some people find it a little funny, but I'm also sorry if you tried it and it was an unpleasant experience for you.

My next game will probably have more puppies and kittens.