Hello!
So I made this game called Underbyte for the jam this year. Once again I was ridiculously ambitious, missed the 48 hour deadline and submitted it to the Jam at silly-o-clock with a stinking headache and amazing sense of accomplishment. I’m really proud of this one as it’s been a bit of an end-of-year Wot I Learned Doing Gamejams test for myself, and I think it’s fun!
The good:
* Overall I was aiming to do some specific things this jam, and focus on that mystery ‘x’ factor known as ‘feeling’. Manic platform shooters seem to be in my blood, they’re great fun to make and I already had a crack at it earlier in the year with “Invertigo”, which wasn’t too great in hindsight. Overall I’d learned a lot of tricks about particle effects, animation, knockback, screen-shake and control tightening that I wanted to apply to something, before diving in to a fuller title in a similar vein.
* The pixels are better! I started this year with a complete lack of knowledge of how to do tiles, and over the jams I’ve been slowly getting my head around things. Not to say the art is anything more than “barely functional”, but I’m on the path to getting my arty skills up to speed. Maybe the first step of the path, but it’s a start!
* Music + sound. People seem to love the soundtrack, which makes me very happy indeed!
* Serendipity. I stumbled across the smash-two-blocks-together-to-destroy-tiles mechanic by complete accident early on, and thought it worked really well! Further investigations neeeded for sure.
* Stencyl. Ooh I love me some middleware, and I wouldn’t have been able to do any of this (much less so quickly) without Stencyl being a very neat engine! Thanks Team Stencyl!
The bad:
* Level design. I’m getting better at this for sure after cranking out loads for my last entry, but the flow still isn’t quite right for me.
* The animation. Yeahhhh… not my strong suit. C-, must try harder!
* Theme intergration. I originally wanted to put in some ‘?’ blocks that gave you random power ups, but only ever one of each. Then I ran out of time trying to desperately polish the game for release, and just didn’t get to implement the feature properly. I stuck in a key to activate a one-time invincibility. It’s crowbarred in, but it kinda works, I really wish I had left time to implement something much more interesting!
Anyway, thanks for all the kind words that have been left so far! It’s already turned up in a few roundups on NAG Online and IndieStatik which is so awesome. And someone’s done a playthrough already which is linked to in the first post, thank you very much to the person that uploaded it! I have plans to keep on going with this game and turn it in to a more complete adventure, so keep an eye out for it!
Oh yeah, play it here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-28/?action=preview&uid=20697