Our LudumDare48 progress
Maybe someone is interested in how others handled the GameJam so I will give a little insight on the progress of our (@zombree, @cephalo and me) game (Sticky Diagnosis) and some implementation parts I worked on that might be interesting.
The start :sleeping:
First off, we did not start when the theme was announced because at least @zombree and I are Europeans and therefore slept. When we woke up we talked about the theme and thought that digging down a hole would be the first thing that comes into mind when hearing "deeper and deeper" as a game theme. So we skipped that idea. Inspired by all the covid testing and thereby putting something into one of the holes in your head, I thought of tongue depressor idea. But because the nose is not easy to illustrate compared to the insides of a mouth, the mouth seemed like the better option.
We wanted to create a 2D/3D games, so that the objects can be illustrated quickly with no need of modelling. After the first testing we had trouble with the perspective because it did not feel like a 3D environment, so we adjusted the FOV and camera angle/position until it looked good. The problem still remained until the end though, as it is hard to know where the sticked leftovers might hit a bacteria. The perspective just makes it very hard.
These were the first drawn prototypes and well, you tell me what you see in them.
As @zombree and me both like to play Rogue-Like games we wanted to bring an aspect of that into this games as well. So the upgrade system was planned from the start. What we had as a game plan now was a tongue depressor going deeper and deeper into a mouth and some kind of upgrade system. We had no idea about any other game mechanic, maybe killing some bacteria on the way or something... ? So we started working! And we came up with everything on the fly.
The Facecam :stuckouttongueclosedeyes:
The facecam came into my mind just because I imagined it being funny to constantly have the struggling patient on your screen and it seemed fairly easy to implement. First idea was to have a split screen but that would have taken away too much screen space from the actual game.
All images for the facecam. Don't ask me why some of them have a black background, it's a Windows mistake. They are all transparent.
The photoshop file is waaay too disgusting and confusing because of the mass of layers now, so I won't show it. But in the end the different faces are multiple combinations of 3 type or eyebrow position/rotations and 5 different eye types (one of them closed). So it makes a total of 15 combinations. The tears/sweat is spawned randomly at some pre-defined locations on the face. The hand consists of 3 different images which also randomly change. The idea of the reveal which shows the patient "operating" on himself also came up while I drew the facecam because it looked like it was his hand.
The environment :tongue:
For the tongue movement we used 9 different images of the tongue and swap those images depending on the players speed. The palate is just one image which is set on repeat and gets shifted depending on the speed. We could not do that with the tongue because the tongue had outlines... In retrospect, I guess we could have used two different textures, one for the outline and one for the inside... but nevermind!
You can easily spot where the loop starts again, but it's not really that visible in the game. Between each image I basically moved everything except the outline down a little, scaled it up and added some dots on top.
The end :ok_woman:
In the end the most important part was probably implementing feedback. It is such a small, yet important part of a game, but it's needed everywhere. We mostly solved it by adding sound effects. I would consider the other parts of the game that I worked on (e.g. the menu) as not really interesting to read about, so I won't bother you with them.
