Prescriptive Perspective - The Devlog

Ah yes, game jams. My third time participating in one, and second time on GMTK's. The theme for this one was, in my opinion, much better and more open than the previous one. It started at 2 PM here, and my sister and I got to brainstorming. I didn't really open construct until about an hour later, when it was time to get all of the ideas we spilled everywhere.

We had three ideas that I thought were worth considering: one where you were a black hole that created things instead of destroying them; a shooter game where you see from the enemies' views; and a racing game where you actually build the track that the cars are supposed to race on. I had no clue how I would make that last one in a good way, and I wasn't sure what would be the objective for the black hole game (although the name Holes Reversed is great), so I ended up going with the second one, as you know. But inside the game files, the black hole and race car are still there.

I made a simple character controller and bullet easily. The camera was the tricky bit, but even then it wasn't so bad... for the start. My idea was that the game would be level-based, but then we decided to make it infinite with the enemies spawning gradually instead. But the way I was handling the camera didn't allow more enemies to just appear on the fly! So I made it based on waves, and each wave would spawn an extra enemy. This had a few problems: due to using set spawnpoints, the enemies often overlapped, meaning you could kill multiple with one shot. I went to make the level, and tried to make the enemies move with the pathfinding behavior, which didn't work, so I just made them move forward toward the player. The level itself has very small changes to the current version, and noticed that enemies could phase through walls because they didn't care about collision. Oh well.

The first thing I did the next day was the main menu. Not too proud of all the scribbly writing and unclear buttons. So next was fixing a bunch of issues from the previous day like the wall-clipping thing, adding player health, and also UI and a death screen. I am SURE that I did a lot more that day, and am just forgetting, but it was probably just trying to fix all of the things I added.

Sunday came and I had 5 hours left. Some things, like making the camera focus on an enemy when the wave starts, and putting the camera on the player when you die, were added here. I also finally fixed the enemy overlap problem, which made the game quite a bit harder. And finally, the enemy speed-up at higher waves. I was planning to add sounds, but couldn't get good ones, so the game was uploaded as it was. Over the 3 days I also got some of my family to playtest or just see the game.

Overall, I love how this one turned out! I would probably say that this is my best game, especially considering it was made in 2 days. Unlike the other jam games I made, this one doesn't have huge apparent flaws or broken mechanics, so that helps put it at the top.

And you guys seem to agree! Thanks so much to everyone for playing and for loving this game, it really is great seeing other people like what I created. I will be making and releasing an updated version soon with a lot of the fixes that players recommended. Stay tuned, I guess, and we'll meet again next year at the next GMTK game jam!