Horrible Pain

Also, I did my 16th game jam, with a game called Barger Tim.

I’m mostly pleased with the graphics, except for the generic cube for the burger dispenser. I might be repeating myself a little, since it uses the “throw food into people’s mouths” shtick that I used once before in Launch Turkey. I completely disregarded the Game Jam advice to get a playable version as quickly as possible, and spent my first day just making the little animated chef model and animations. This is the second game where I’ve made all my animations in Blender instead of animating in Unity. (The first is The Spider Who Would Only Eat Candy.)

Jupiter Hadley did a play video. (Along with hundreds of other games from the same jam.) It demonstrates the comment I’ve got from some other people that they tried to grab burgers by standing under the dispenser, and also shows how easy it is to overlook the “hold the throw button to throw harder” mechanic. I so often make game jam games with absolutely no play-testing and this sort of “assume the controls are more obvious than they are” is a mistake I really should have had drilled out of my head by now.

If I make changes to this, I’ll try to make those controls more obvious, either by trying alternate control schemes, or by just providing instruction. I’ll also play with the head movement; instead of moving a constant speed, they’ll zip up to a starting line, and zip away from a exit line. I think this will help make losing a life feel better, the delay between “This head is out of range for you to hit” and “This head has actually docked you a life” is kind of bad.

So I just made Pirate Jammers during a game jam on the weekend. It’s compatible with the Winnitron arcade machine.

I’m going to go through the thought process a little bit.

First inkling of an idea was roller derby with boats going around an island. And since it’s a two-player game, you’d have to control multiple boats, by switching between them. I had been thinking about roller derby for a while as something to bring into a game, but as a scoring method that would allow for team play. With only two players, and the switching between boats, it would be a different take from what I was thinking, but it’s still the inspiration for it.

I briefly considered frogs as an alternate theme, plus then you could have parts of the track on land and parts on water, with different movement in each, but the physics of boats accelerating & decelerating was too enticing. I also had first planned to use a turn-based timer mechanic, like you’d have five seconds to adjust your direction of movement for all four ships, then they’d move for a round, then repeat. I had seen a turn-based cart racer that did something like this. But I decided that real-time worked better for an arcade setting.

I got the basic control scheme working pretty quick. I first tried a version where every ship went straight from the direction you last set them. I thought that might have potential to work with the frantic “switching between ships” thing, make you constantly grab whichever ship is getting off course. But it didn’t feel right, so I tried a version where they automatically followed the track, but you could steer them inwards or outwards. That’s basically what the final game uses, with some minor tweaks, like it will gradually straighten back into the path if you leave it alone.

Initially because of the basis on roller derby, I started all the ships on the same side of the island, but in practice it gave too much of an advantage to whoever was on the inside track, so I put them on opposite sides of the island to make it more even.

Scoring in roller derby is based on the jammer passing an opposing player, and in retrospect this is probably something I should have dropped. I spent a good chunk of time on Saturday trying to get the lapping mechanism working. I succeeded, but this scoring mechanism combined with how the game controls, made it very difficult to score any points at all, especially in the short time they would be playing the game. And if one side pulled ahead, it was incredibly difficult for the player behind to catch up.

To address this first problem, I introduced a turtle that randomly pops up and a large tanker ship, to act as obstacles that could throw the game out of a deadlock.

The other problem was that players were often confused about how the scoring worked.

Maybe I should have just dropped that method of scoring entirely and gone with something more basic like count how many laps you’ve done.

Shortly after the jam, I started considering what if I just did a version where instead of lapping a single island like this, you were racing down a long path filled with obstacles, and if your ship fell too far behind, it was lost. It might get more mileage out of the frantic-switching element.

And actually while writing this, I’m wondering if I should have done more with the outer bounds of the track. Basically, as it is, the penalty for going too far from the island is fairly minor, it just means you’re lapping a little slower than everyone else. If being outside the track meant you were chased by a kraken, or there were many more obstacles out there, then I think that would both help emphasize the frantic ship switching, and would create a new way the player in the lead could accidentally lose the lead. This wouldn’t address the players being confused about scoring, which may be a problem I’m importing from roller derby.

For the latest Ludum Dare the theme was Unconventional Weapon. I made a game where you ran over bowling-pin-shaped goblins with a car. This was my 15th game jam.

I had been interested in bowling variants lately.

At the start, I thought maybe you would set the direction of path of the car, more of a puzzle to get it around some obstacles, but I decided just steering it was more fun.

Compared to my car in Trampoline Cop, I tried to make this proportioned more like a real car, and I also relied more on the pixel illustration for details instead of mesh geometry. Also unlike Trampoline Cop, I relied on the Standard Asset vehicle in Unity. There are some things like stabilizer bars that made it easier to rely on the pre-existing script.

What I ended up spending the most time on was two things, both because they were prone to be buggy:
1) The camera movement
2) How to test whether the pins were finished falling over.

I think I will return to this, clean it up, expand on it.

The things I wanted to get to but ran out of time:
1) The scoring isn’t all there.
2) There’s a major bug if you manage to spin the car around, the frame never ends.
3) I want to try out bumpy lanes, or lanes with slight curves, to mix it up a little