LD58 was my first foray out of the tutorial zone. Fortunately for me, I got to make Mailbox Mania together with a much more experienced game dev in Wuppos.
In a coffee and brainstorm session on the first morning, we made a long list of all the things, concepts, and gameplay elements we could think of around the theme "Collector". We narrowed it down to two ideas that we were most excited about: an isometric racer with collectibles and a deck-building trading card game. Next, we spent a strict fifteen minutes scoping out the 72-hour version of each idea. It quickly became clear that we had a much more coherent vision for the racer than for the card game.
Both of us really liked the image of a frenetic mail van hurriedly picking up mail all over a quiet town and we knew that we wanted to make an arcade-style game with a fixed camera and a running timer. The rest just fell into place:
- The van must be fast and the controls should be challenging but satisfying.
- The map must have sharp turns and precise drifting should be rewarded.
- Power-ups should present meaningful choices: Is it better to go for extra time (or speed) or another mailbox collection?
Wuppos picked up all of the art for this project. On day one, he got started on the sprite stacking tech, while I set up a test map to work on the van controls. It turns out that the key to making satisfying driving controls is to consider the movement of the front and rear wheels individually (e.g., only the front wheels turn), and to counteract player-controlled acceleration with friction and air drag. I found it quite challenging to make the controls feel good. There are a lot of variable parameters and because keyboard input is binary, there is no notion of how strongly the player turns the wheel. Our goal was to have something playable at the end of day one. So, although I was not happy with the van controls, I moved on to coding the game manager, the pick-ups, and the collisions, while Wuppos was finishing up the first sprites for all the major game elements.
On day two, it was clear that getting the driving to feel good was a priority. As I watched Wuppos have a crack at it, I learned my first big lesson of the game jam: juice doesn't have to obey the laws of physics :scream:. We could simply make the van drift when it would feel good for it to drift. He also found a sneaky solution to the binary car steering problem: tying the turning angle to how long the key is pressed. Over the rest of the day, I worked on the power-ups, start and end screen, game timer, and scoring. By the end of the day, we had a complete, legitimately fun game on our hands!
I had to sign off at the end of day two due to unfortunately timed work constraints on Monday. But, I had the distinct pleasure of checking in that evening to find the truly insane levels of polish that Wuppos single-handedly added to the game! There were now tire tracks, smoke and flame particles, additional art assets on top of a slapping soundtrack and a beautiful title screen. I realised that I had not been correctly gauging how important the little things are in taking a game to the next level: big lesson number two from this jam.
Anyway, big thanks to Wuppos for letting me jam with him! I had a great time and I'm revved up for the next one. Please do check out Mailbox Mania if you haven't yet. We've already gotten some wonderful and super helpful feedback and we would love to hear from you too!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3371170/CHARK/
