For the platform game go HERE

Autopsy of the graphics/level design guy. Big thanks to all the graphics/level design feedback we’ve had, really useful!

Gripe: don’t knock the Jam as easy or Soft 😉

• Less elitism of 48hr Compo please. There are a lot of reasons to do the Jam and yes it has relaxed rules and longer, but it’s a TEAM event. That in itself is the reason Will (the dev) and I enter the Jam rather than two separate entries (my solo effort would be crap I admit).

Good

• Teamwork
• Atmosphere – very much what we were after
• Large level
• Sound track choice (not composed specifically for this project – royalty-free from http://incompetech.com/music/royalty-free/
• Parallax (scrolling backgrounds). Very pleased with them.

Sad

• Controls: Could be better! Not being tile-based made the coding more tedious, and in the end we didn’t have time to fine-tune it at all.
• Level design: There’s one place where you get stuck, and it’s not always obvious which platforms can be stood on

Different if done again/more time

• Better shading
• Particles to make Treasure more obvious and cooler
• More obvious where you can stand – maybe add another layer to the engine so that platform highlights can be overlaid on the ‘scene’ layer
• More hand-shaded graphics.
• Add a music composer to the team

 

1. fluffy stuff 

I love the theme, it conjures up ideas of James Bond/Despicable Me/the Incredibles mega-villains. My creativity raced. But then we had to tone it down as we wanted the game to be playable by kids (the Dev is a particularly protective Victorian father!!!).

I don’t regret, but it definitely made the artwork more challenging for me as my natural style is a bit darker and grimier. We’d decided the day before to do a 2d platformer, but using 3d graphics and without tiling. We took a huge amount of inspiration from this cartoon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=neXDENKnC7A <jump 2 mins in. Maybe you can see it, maybe not.

Deliberate game-play choices included:

1. No death. When you run out of lives (the 9 cats at the bottom), the end splash shows you going to gaol not dead
2. No attack. The player has to avoid all the enemies, and they do not noticeable ‘attack’ the player. This also reduced the feature list.

 

2. Tools

Will developed the level editor over the first two days. Of course it took longer than we’d expected but for me this was an excellent feature and made the overall game much faster to deliver. It definitely was goal-orientated – it has quirks and missing features but was more than adequate for me to test artwork and build the level. The final level composition only took about an hour(!). Also, it allowed me to save to GitHub, thus eliminating the endless emailing of artwork for consolidation that was a bottleneck last time. I’ll let Will do the post-mortem on the tools but for me this was a massive plus.

3. graphics

the most obvious feature is that it’s not tile based. By the final build we had 6 layers (counting player, enemy and treasure as a single layer). The majority of the platform graphics were G3D format models built in Blender and all using the same texture. I had difficulties with getting the depth right to not cut off or draw in front of the objects.

The level builder including an auto-normals function but we forgot to use it before submitting. :C

The reason we used 3D graphics was because we’d planned to use better lighting effects but like so much these got de-scoped due to time.

The background Parallax uses large PNG files with hand-drawn shading. 2d graphics made using bog-standard MS Paint, GIMP , plus a Bamboo graphics tablet.