Strange Powerups Postmortem

This was my second game jam and second original game posted to itch.io. When GoedWare posted a poll for themes, there were a few that I really liked. The themes "companion" and "you are not the main character" had me picturing a detective,  aided by his dog (and by aided, I mean the dog does all the work), as they set about a day of investigations. Excitement had me thinking about all the possible crimes they could solve from lost keys when trying to leave for the police station to finding clues in a murder.

And then the theme was "strange powerups" and I was at a loss. I'm not much of an action/powerup gamer and had very little frame of reference to come up with an idea. Whereas with my first game jam, I was able to hit the ground running, I spent a few days trying to think of a game that used powerups in a creative way. After a long weekend, I had decided to use mixology to craft potions that would imbibe the user with power. At first, I thought of myself as the mad scientist creating the potions, but instead I decided the player would take control of the imbiber. I thought this would be more exciting and players would favor different powerups based on their style of play.

Just as I was beginning to sit down to start writing some code, a friend shared a contact who specialized in modeling/art. It was a relief to get some fresh ideas and take some pressure off of myself when it came to the theme of the game. The artist sent over some character art and that really helped shape the overall theme of the game. My mad scientist became a bartender and my battle arena became a bar room. Humanoid enemies became fish people and horn shooting narwhals. It was a really creative perspective and I'm thankful to the artist who took it in that direction.

The programming itself was slower going than I would have liked. Early obstacles included animating a sprite that moved 8 directions where I normally work with left and right. Instead of flipping the sprite, I had to calculate player direction and apply either an attack, idle, or walk animation for N, NW, W, etc. The same had to be done for the enemy characters but because they were moved by navigation and not my input, I couldn't copy over the player code. I think there may have been a way to implement the same code for both but since I had lost out on the first weekend, I didn't really have time to optimize and refactor.

Another challenge was the variety of attacks and their effects. Some shot projectiles, some created areas attached to the player, and some left areas on the floor. Once again, I was mostly writing each attack from scratch instead of creating a common class that would have satisfied the needs of all the attacks. This made the attack programming sluggish and is where I spent the majority of my time. I was also struggling with the implementation of attacks like teleportation and the cannonball (player curls themselves up and launches across the room). The issue with these two was making sure the player landed in a navigable area of the bar. I believe I could have done this with more time but as these were the last items left on the last night before the deadline, they were left out of the game and replaced with the basic melee attack. I hate leaving things unfinished but I'd rather sacrifice a mechanic than the entire game.

The biggest challenge of all was motivation. In my previous game jam, I felt like every moment was exciting and I was learning new things constantly. On this jam, I felt I was moving uphill with the tools I had instead of finding creative ways to accomplish tasks. With a lot of support from my partner, I was able to piece everything (well almost everything) together one step at a time. What I really learned was how to keep moving forward even when you feel like you can't. While this isn't my favorite work, the game is fun and I have a few favorite powerups that I really enjoyed using (Medusa and Energy Parry). I hope others find their favorite powerup as well.

Thank you for playing and reading!

Mr. Paul