This post describes into detail the game I made for the Arbitrary Game Jam last weekend, and is a mirror of the post on my own website. You can get it here.
The last real new game I released was back in June last year, when I launched Cloud Chap as part of the Nitrome Jam (which is nearly 10000 times played by now). After that, I’d decided to spend some time into full-fledged projects, instead of small jam games. This is my first game jam in a long while, and it is also the shortest one I participated in- I had three days to create a game. In this jam, the themes would be randomly generated and announced 24 hours prior to the jam. I wasn’t sure I would participate if I couldn’t think of a game idea in one day, but this window of time was apparently enough to create a game around the ‘Defiance’ theme.
Back in the Flappy Jam, I battled it out against my brother. We both delivered a game (mine is pictured below), and he won (because he had received two ratings, and I one). This time we tried battled it out again. My brother, not as skilled as I am, came short in time and only created a puzzle game featuring a dog that shoots lasers. He is still working on the game, though, so we’ll see what he makes of it.
The game I made about coloring the city with your graffiti. If anyone ever played de Blob, that is where part of the idea comes from. Instead of coloring everything in a specific color, here you are just asked to paint specific objects in a random color. This game was also based on another idea I had, involving a crazy pizza delivery game. I might even start building that using this game as a base! Things like arrows pointing towards targets where taken from that game idea.
First, I started out creating more of a sandbox. It was a city. I made it somewhat lively by placing lots of different objects, creating them as I went, rather than thinking of a gameplay objective for them first. This is rather interesting- instead of creating a goal for the game first, I created the means, the toys to reach an eventual goal. It was, and maybe still is, more of a playground than a real game. This isn’t a good or a bad thing, it’s just something that I’ve never tried to achieve in a game before. It is very interesting game design by itself.
So, of course your IDE has no function for merging colors built in, right? Wrong! Not only could I specify which colors are merged, but also how much they where merged. Having functions like this really improves the amount of creativity one can quickly input in the game. Not only that, but there where also functions for path finding built in, which makes the killer phone booth move pretty smart, and the automatic camera following a specified object. I realized this is an important reason I still use Game Maker instead of another, more ‘core’ programming language. If something was completely colored, it would get a checkmark next to it, so the player is always sure that he has fully colored this thing. It also makes the game somewhat playable for colorblind, who can use the checkmark as their main point of progress.
The main weapon is the graffiti spray, and after a explaining the idea to a group of kids at my school, they also coined the idea of the ability of taping the top of a graffiti bottle so that it would spray continuously until it was empty. This was added in-game as the paint bomb- in addition to the above named effect, it would also spray out a large burst of paint as as last attack. It is not a really useful weapon (not without any upgrades anyway) but it is a nice tool (‘toy’) to make the game more interesting.
It was not until the last day that I added in the actual gameplay goal- simply ‘Color all of object X’. After finishing such mission, you would change colors, get upgrades, and start the new mission. We added a goal- but nothing to halt the players process. You can make a perfectly interesting game without missions and dangers, but a game with only one of those would quickly fall flat. I actually wanted to sprite a policeman and make that the default enemy, but the difficulty was to make him move as intended within the time I had left. I also didn’t have the time to sprite one, so I used the phone booth as a placeholder sprite- and it held up quite well. I got the idea to replace certain normal objects with dangerous ones one the player achieved a certain mission, as a bit of surprise element for the player, as well as not having to deal with finding a good random place to spawn it. But all in all, the game is fairly easy- there are just two dangerous object, and if you get finished, you just have to restart the current mission, not the whole game.
After that, I also added in a score system. Actually, I don’t know. Maybe for coloring things other than what you are supposed to color. For replayability, perhaps. Maybe as a reason to make those small, cute score pop-ups. It is an easy way to make a player feel rewarded for what he’s doing, but by far not the best way. One thing I would’ve liked to do would be to include a online highscore list.
Also a quicky- the upgrade system. You can upgrade six different things, and each time you complete a mission it pick two upgrades (one from a set of three and another from another set of three). I initially intended to make the player choose the upgrades themselves, but I was too short in time to implement it, but I had already done some work on it and decided not to cut the feature, but to make it random. It would firstly make the game more replayable (not really needed for a jam game, but also something I hadn’t tried in a game before) and would give the player a feeling of getting more powerful (that didn’t really work out, a system where you hand-pick upgrades will be definitely better). The only thing I couldn’t really test if the powers are well balanced- for now I’ve only seen the character speed boost and the bomb’s final explosion range increase make a noticeable impact.
Also, this is the first time I actively shared a game’s process on Twitter! GameJolt automatically integrates all jam-related tweets into the jam page (but I usually add a column in Tweetdeck that also displays them). Usually I like to keep process that I make in my games a secret, so all releases are complete surprises and I can cancel them without anyone getting disappointed. But on the other hand, you can get much more attention for your game by sharing process regularly. During the jam I put out about two tweets a day, and I think that is a good balance between showing everything that you do each day without showing things that have no/little news value. And it works- it resulted in more retweets, favorites and even responses than I’d ever received before. I guess I will be tweeting more in the future. I’ll put it in my good habit list.
I caught some GIFs using Gyazo to post using Twitter. Normally I think of GIFs as dark magic, since capturing a good one is a hard task even using utilities GifCam and LiceCap, and getting them to upload correctly is a pain, but Gyazo captures them perfectly and uploads them immediately at no further cost. The only real downside is that GIFs can be maximally about six seconds. It is a nice replacement for Twitter’s TwitPic, which takes credits for pictures you uploadand has an MB limit for images.
If I would’ve had more time on the game, I would have made a larger city with more objects, and some sort of quick travel method by ‘lending’ idle vehicles, mainly to make it feel more like a city. Many of you will know what I mean when I name GTA as an example of this, but since I never played that series, I’ll name Lego City Undercover as an example. I’d build different areas, such as a city or a university. Also, there needs to be a more dynamic traffic system, since the current one just lets pedestrians and cars follow a specified path. I guess those ideas will go towards the pizza delivery game I mentioned earlier.
There are lots of small details in the game. For example, hold space and you’ll walk slowly, so you can walk and fully spray something at the same time. Many of the ads and traffic signs include sprites from either one of my own games or one of the other amazing indie games out there. The signposts also include a few messages, and you can show them by pressing [E] when standing close to one. The text on the signpost sprite itself also has a meaning, it’s encoded in morse. The effect that the lanterns emit was inspired by this post on Joost’s awesome blog, and I even went to Steam’s Hardware Survey site to find out what the smallest acceptable resolution would be for the game. Lastly, the game also secretly puts out a screenshot the exact moment you finish the game, as a small token of remembrance.
After that I went out and played some other jam games! All devs out there are amazing, the host is super friendly and Jupiter Hadley has already finished recording all games (she almost plays all the games as fast as we can make them with the fifty of us!) It is now up to MadMarcel to cast the final votes. Personally I would have preferred community voting, but I guess I’ll see how this works out. Until then!
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