So I am in the last 24 hours of the weekly game jam and I am crunching! There is a lot I want to do but I must keep in mind my minimal viable product. With about a day left to work on this let us take a look at what’s new!

Fail States

A very important, and often overlooked, part of any game are the fail states. These are moments in the game when the player’s inputs are rejected or when the player does something the designer doesn’t want them to do. A fail state can be anything from dying to getting hurt, or just bumping into a wall. Fail states are just as important as success states and often are what make a game fun at all. As an example go back and look at crash bandicoot and notice all the different (and fun) ways crash can die.

Bumping into walls

For this game, I took the time to make every fail state feel fun. I took a look at bumping into walls and made that fun by making the player character bounce off of walls when running into them instead of just stopping momentum altogether.

Getting Hit/Hurt

Next was getting hit/hurt by enemies. Originally I just had the character flash red for a second but that didn’t really come across well. Often I wouldn’t even notice when I would get hit and would end up dying without even knowing. So then I added some pushback when getting hit. Here I used the same physics as bouncing off walls. This helps prevent enemies from comboing you and makes it clearer to the player when it is you are getting hurt. I then made it so that the player could not attack while getting hit. This actually effects gameplay now and makes it even clearer for the player when they are being hurt. But it still didn’t feel painful to get hit.

Making Players FEEL Pain

I wanted the player to flinch whenever you get hit in order to simulate pain. In order to do this, I created a big red lightning bolt that goes from one end of the screen to the other. It’s the biggest sprite in the game. But I still wasn’t done. Next, I made the entire screen shake whenever you got hit. In order to do this, I had to create a whole camera system just for this one moment of hurt. Finally, I added a time stop when getting hit. The game actually slows down on hit. All of these things combined result in a moment (lasting less than a second) that feels great but largely goes unnoticed. These are the things players don’t see but feel. This is what’s known as game-juicyness.

That’s my devlog for r/n let me know what you think ;)