Well, I’m now awake enough for the first time since the jam ended to write about my game, The Outsider.

It’s a first-person space shooter with 360 degree movement (y’know, like Descent). With this Jam, I really wanted to try out some simple techniques I’d been working out for making passable art (I’m no artist!). Mainly using flat colours with lighting + outline shaders and SSAO to create quite a strong, abstract style. It seemed to work out pretty well!

Gameplay wise, I actually changed the game quite radically early on. The idea of creating cube-rooms was really just because of limitation of my artist abilities. And I figured it would be quite easy to have a transformable world of such rooms, which would fit the theme well. From there, I started thinking about the movie Cube (for which the set for the entire film was just a single square room) – and in some ways it’s similarity to the dungeons of the original Zelda.

I like the idea of building the dungeon in real time around the player so I stuck with that, but originally, I thought the player should choose which rooms to build. I wanted to make them a wizard constructing the dungeon around them to try and reach an objective. I had difficulty with building on the core gameplay with that one, though, and I was eager to get started implementing something so eventually I decided to go with a more traditional dungeon crawl but with Descent-like twist.

I actually got most of the work for this done pretty quick! The core gameplay was playable by Saturday night (I didn’t start till mid-day due to time zones and obligations). So I had time to compose music and add some special features… I even got a boss encounter done! It’s the sort of thing that I always think about having quite early during LD then usually abandon before the game is finished due to running out of time for new features.

You can play it here!