PROGRAMMER ART FOR THE WIN!!!

The game jam that birthed this game is over, and we got TOP 10 IN FUN BABYYYY!!!! Don't look at the other scores or the comments they're not important stop looking at me like that

Future Plans n' stuff!

Alright, so the game might look "like garbage" or whatever, but there's clearly something about this project that people responded to. I got a lot of incredible feedback surrounding the actual core mechanic of the game, and it felt like I got a decent number of reviews for a project with such minimalist graphicals. So, in case there’s anyone who’d be interested in seeing that mechanic explored more fully, I wanted to announce some early-stage plans for a post-jam version of this game, along with some going into what my thought process was when I built this first version! 

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(If you would be into seeing where this project might go, make sure you follow my itch account! I'm new to itch still, so I'm still working on building a bit of a following. Thanks for joining and helping out!

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Playing Against Your Past Self

The idea of an obstacle that follows your movements exactly took some inspiration from the shadow-segments in platforming games like Mario and Celeste. But while those mechanics are designed to keep you moving and give you a panicked rush feeling, I wanted to lean more into the puzzle side of that mechanic. I wanted it to feel more like Snake, where you get to a point in the game where you purposefully plan out a winding route that leaves the most possible room for your future self to maneuver around.  That’s also why I feel like the 6-second time limit was a little too strict, and changing that to give the player more time to move a bit slower is the first thing I plan to change in the post jam version.

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I also wanted to make sure the shadows’ movements were properly telegraphed to the player. During play testing, I realized that most players tended to avoid the smooth, predictable routes that are often taken by the average easy-to-dodge bullet-hell enemy. The original movement for the game was much more agile and snappy, with basic up=up left=left etc. controls. This made every change in direction feel sudden and unpredictable from an outsider’s perspective—really hard to dodge when it’s 4  levels later and you have  8 other enemies taking similarly sudden and unpredictable routes.  Changing the controls to an asteroid-style left-right-to-steer/up-down-to-accelerate gave the shadows some level of predictability at least in terms of the general direction they’re moving in.

It also gave the difficulty a new layer,  where learning the kind of unintuitive controls is a challenge on its own. This is a kind of controversial side-effect though, out of all the features of the game the feeling that the player was hard to control was the most divisive. Difficulty coming from weird controls is a hard thing to pull off, so I’ll probably be running some play tests soon to see if there’s a more intuitive option

"This game looks like garbage..."

_{~my favorite review that I've gotten of the current version}

Yeah the default pygame green is a little rough lol, I promise a graphics overhaul will be at the top of the list for the final release. ...But besides making the colors a little less eye-straining I'm not expecting to be anywhere near the art-pass stage for another solid while at least. My strength is not in visuals, and while I'm not saying I couldn't learn I don't wanna and I'd much rather wait on hiring a professional artist until I know for sure what kind of art the game's actually going to need. I'm not exactly made of money over here, so I'd recommend trying to get used to the programmer art for now.

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***NOTE: That is unless you're an artist yourself that's reading this! If you're at all interested in helping out with concept art and character design or whatever,  comment on this post, send me an email (zachbrian.petersen@gmail.com) or dm my discord (zacharyisnthere) whenever you feel like it. Thank you so much!***

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But what WILL the game probably look like? What are these future plans I keep alluding to?

I was going to have a section here where I talk about that, but I'm already late getting this devlog announcement up, so you'll have to just wait! I'll have a new post with my goals and milestones lined up soon, look for it sometime in the next week or so.  Remember to maybe follow my itch page or whatever, it lets me know there's actually some support for this! 

Thanks for reading, hope to see you again soon!