Whew, I finished!
I didn’t have nearly as much time as I would have liked, but I still managed to put together a passable game! I think I can do much better next time, if I prepare a little bit more in advance.
My last game ended up being absurdly short, because I had to hand-script every piece of content. This time, I wanted to get higher bang-for-buck by making more repeatable, “grindy” content. I decided to go with sort of an adventure/RPG, where you have to grind up levels to access the next area.
Unfortunately, to make a grindy game design work, I think you still need a few hand-placed elements to give the player some goals. I kind of failed at that because I ran out of time. I think adding a few boss battles, hidden areas to explore, and power-ups to find would have helped the game a ton!
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What Went Right
Blob Characters
I really like the look I used for my little blob creatures. I’m terrible at art, but this was easy and cute. I was able to layer different types of eyes, horns, tails, etc. to make different looks, which was great for an evolution-themed game. I just wish I had time to make more variations.
World Map design
To make the world, I simply drew a giant 1024×1024 texture using palletized color, and blew each pixel up to a 32×32 tile. I could easily query the color of each tile, and I defined different terrain properties based on the index in the color palette (for example, blue is water, so you can’t walk in it). My original plan was to draw a texture for each tile, but I ended up liking the way it looked.
I used a similar technique to define difficulty levels for each part of the map. I “painted” level bands onto different parts of the continent using Gimp, which let me throw in a lot of content very quickly. Areas colored darker shades of red auto-spawn higher level enemies.
Collision/pathing
This went surprisingly smoothly. The enemies don’t really pathfind, they just attempt to slide around obstacles, but it ends up looking pretty good most of the time.
What Went Wrong
Lack of goals
As noted earlier, I think this game would really benefit from having a few bosses, secret areas, etc. to break up the gameplay. An ending would also be awesome. I wanted to do this stuff, but I just ran out of time.
Low bang-for-buck art
I wasted a lot of time making really terrible artwork. For example, the boulder that covers the cave entrance. It doesn’t look that good, and it doesn’t match the style of the world map. I wish I had just embraced the uber-pixellated style to begin with, and spent that time on more content.
Movement speed upgrades
Toward the beginning of the game, you move agonizingly slowly, and you slowly upgrade until you move so fast it’s annoying. Why on earth did I do that?The tail is cool, because it’s a one-time bonus, but constantly increasing your movement speed just doesn’t work very well as a progression mechanic.
Conclusion
Overall I think I have a lot of good stuff in this game, and I’m definitely tempted to put more time into it. My original plan was to have different terrain “hazards” that you could evolve adaptations for, e.g. ice, lava, learning to swim, etc. The engine is already set up to do that, I just didn’t quite get around to it. I’d also love to add a few more “special” mutations, add some bosses, and try to improve the combat gameplay and enemy variety.
I think my basic strategy was pretty good this time, so next time I’m going to focus on cutting corners, nailing down the art style earlier, and preparing my code/engine in advance. I think if I squeeze out just a few extra hours, I can make something really cool next time.
