With the weekend behind us there’s finally enough time to write about our dev journey. Before hand we had chosen our technology stack: libgdx and Scala. Both were relatively new to us so, with a hard lesson learned during LD#24, decided to keep the game simple. We started the first morning brainstorming some ideas, such as a factory-simulator with 10s cycles and various running games. We settled on recreating an old classic with a new twist: gauntlet with a timer.
The pure basics were already laid out, but it still took an entire day to get familiar enough with the tools to get a solid foundation up. Some place holder graphics were scribbled into place. At this point there was nothing except a map and the player movement, with collision detection almost working :). No complete images survived this stage, the earliest screenshot I had stored already has final floor texture.
Crude wall assets, early weapon and player character
Day 2 continued with more of the basics getting set up: level transitions, loading, enemy logic, item pickups. We kept experimenting with the game play the entire time, tweaking variables and assets pretty ad hoc. The code quality also took a slight nose dive with “getting it done” taking priority. Before turning in for the night I had taken a stab at implementing the enemy movement, with poor results:
Experimenting with the UI
We quickly wrapped up major missing functions during the third day. We hadn’t yet decided if the game would feature random levels and never end, but decided against it. We implemented some auxiliary features such as the red potion to boost weapon damage, and spent the last hours before submission on level design and packaging the product. The video below is from early Monday, testing video capture.
It would definitely been nice to document the development process more to see the evolution of the game and our process. We did generate a video of the code changes in the git repository using gource. Documenting the dev process is something for us to work on when entering more competitions.
The finished product feels like a game, an aspect we especially wanted to concentrate on, with good controls and a clear progression. The goal of the game should maybe be more evident, and the lack of music and quality sound effects are something we should see to in future endeavors . All in all we are pleased with how it turned out, and how much we learned while making it.