Finally decided to take the plunge into one of these! I'm really excited to see what everyone comes up with and test myself as a developer. I've done little things here and there, but I've never managed to get myself to "complete" anything. Hope I can shake that bad habit off with this!

Best of luck! ^_^

I've never did a proper post mortem before, so apologies if I'm misusing the term. I wanted to properly gather my thoughts about my game, and what I learned while working on it:

To begin with, this was my first game jam, and I just kind of spontaneously threw myself into it lol

I didn’t really do a lot of research into the mindset and workflow a Jam actually required, so I ran headfirst into a lot of amateur mistakes. To start, I made the questionable mistake of picking the kind of game I wanted to make before I even knew the theme… which caused me a lot of headaches down the line. The initial idea I had in mind was actually a 2D character action platformer. To be specific, I envisioned a Mega Man Zero styled game with various mechanics inspired by Devil May Cry and Platinum’s game catalogue. Obviously, I wasn’t expecting to build the actual game in two days, but I was curious to see how far I’d get regardless. It was surprisingly difficult to figure out what mechanics and features I wanted to keep considering how I knew I wouldn’t be making a fully-fledged game during the Jam. However, as mentioned- a lot of valuable time went into trying to see what mechanics I’d even be able to keep as well as pruning ideas and mechanics off the base idea as opposed to starting with something simple from the onset and developing upwards. I definitely learned a lot about project scope and the dangers of feature creep from this, that’s for sure lol

(If you're wondering why the healthbar in the game looks empty, here's why)

I’d initially planned to include a transformation mechanic that would let the player switch between three forms: a gun based form using projectiles, a sword based form, and a melee based form. But I had to cut that since I didn’t really know how to implement it on my own. I eventually settled on just making the player use the gun as I’d had experience with making shooting objects before in Game Maker Studio. I actually went back and forth with the shooting mechanics as well. At one point, the gun would have had limited ammo that you would have had to reload by defeating enemies. However, I quickly realized that such a mechanic wouldn’t have worked very well considering how the gun was the only weapon the player would get, and reloading the gun after every three shots wasn’t very fun. So I decided to make it function based off of the buster mechanics in Mega Man and gave the player infinite ammo, but only three bullets could exist on screen at a time. I really wanted to include a charge mechanic as well, but I couldn’t get it to behave right and ended up scrapping it too.

So basically, I vastly overshot the scope of what I was able to do at the time and ended up going with the bare minimum of what I envisioned. It sucks to think about how inexperienced I am at the moment, but it is what it is. To be honest, most of my dev time was spent on cutting out mechanics, asset making and visual aesthetics as opposed to coding. I want to find a better method of partitioning my time in the future so I'll be safe when problems arise (as they tend to do in these kind of projects).

Rogues Gallery:

(I wrote this up before I even knew what I wanted them to look like. The ones in the game were a quick placeholder)

The enemies are really simple too, right? I initially came up with a handful of enemy variants that would move around and attack the player with slashes, punches, and projectiles to complement the player’s possible form changes… but I quickly realized that, much like the form changing and melee attacks themselves, these enemies were a bit too far out of reach for me and settled for making them turrets basically. They operate on the same rules as the player, so it wasn’t too hard to port the code over. I repeatedly tried to get their sprites to animate when shooting as well, but I couldn’t get it to work in time. Just another thing I’ll have to figure out now that the dust has cleared lol

The main man himself:

(From left to right: The melee-based Striker Raven form, sword-based Buster Falcon form, and gun-based Cannon Eagle form)

Even though the graphics are somewhat rushed, I ended up spending a lot of my time trying to polish the main character’s look and feel. Geist is supposed to be a “cool” kind of henshin hero, so I wanted to convey his personality to the player somehow, even though this is a prototype. This is why the ending screen has a picture of him posing with the sword even though it never made it into the actual game lol

The starting screen has a similar thing going on with the pose Geist takes. It was actually the concept for his melee based form. By the way, this is why both forms have different “crests” in the art. I probably should have just redrew my assets based on his gun form since it’s the only one that’s actually playable, but I liked them both too much to truly get rid of them. Looking back on everything with a clear mind, I’m actually glad that all three of his forms still found a way into this game somehow.

Speaking of which, I mentioned how Geist was supposed to be a henshin hero (he transforms similar to a Kamen Rider or the Power Rangers), but I wasn’t even able to put any shots of Geist’s human self into the game! I planned for the level to open with him transforming into Geist and then letting you control him, but it ended up being too difficult to actually implement properly. I figured that I’d have the player’s sprite point to his transformation animation, and when it was finished, it would then point to his idle transformation, but the player would always get locked into the transformation sprite or ignore that sprite entirely and point to the idle sprite outright, which is why it was ultimately cut. I even drew up an entire set of pre-transformation sprites, but nothing came of them lol

(A few of the aforementioned sprites. I’m especially proud of the subtle coat animation. Can’t wait to work that into the game properly!)

What went right: For starters, I actually finished it in time and published it. It’s actually a playable game that I made and I’m proud of it regardless of how it came out in the end. The one thing I wanted to accomplish from entering this Jam was to finish making a playable game that you could actually win and it happened. I know it’s not much, but if you can take away even an ounce of the passion and fun that I had while working on Raven Knight Geist, I’ll be overjoyed! ^_^