GAIAttack 30-day Postmortem

I spent the first days of our 30-day polish expanding the gameplay. We liked juggling enemies in the jam version, but the enemy reactions could be better! How high should enemies fly? How far? Lots of little tweaking. I added a “Hit ID” system to player actions, so enemies wouldn’t get struck from the same attack twice.

New attacks were introduced. A ground pound to smash enemies below. A strong punch to smash enemies against walls. The upward attack also became a sort of secondary jump, allowing players to move higher and farther.

Once the player interactions felt pretty solid, I started prototyping new enemies. The original enemies were pretty basic, so I started by adding new behaviors. What if enemies chased the player? What if they jumped with the player or when near the player?

Lots of fun interactions came from the prototyping. It was pretty fast and fun. We had eight enemies types in before SXSW began.

Multiplayer SXSW

From the beginning, GAIAttack seemed a good candidate for multiplayer. Knowing that Shaun and Matt would soon arrive in Austin for SXSW, I spent a few hours adding basic support for multiple players.

They arrived. We coded, tested, tweaked, and had a truck load of fun. Working together in person helped us quickly refine the multiplayer interactions. We also discovered a weird input lag in our Mac version, but by packaging the game as an AIR app, the game lag disappeared. Sweet!

Finding the game

Two weeks left. We had the juggling and enemy interactions in a good place, but it was only fun in the short term. It was still just a single screen game.

So we brainstormed new directions. An RPG leveling system? Hmm. A side-scrolling adventure? Maybe… A vertical climb. YES!

If the player was climbing, parachuting enemies would be natural obstacles. Also, it’d be great to see the airship the sky pirates were parachuting from.

I worked on adding this behavior while Shaun created the ship.

And Then I Saw the Airship

It was love at first sight.

I could see it, how each level would end: WHOOSH. The ship flies in. Players jump aboard. WHIRR. The ship takes of at hight speed. Players battle the Captain in a brawl to the death. BAM. The ship does down with the captain. KAABOOM.

The airship was the final turning point in GAIAttack for me. It changed up the gameplay and allowed us to introduce boss battles at the end of each level. This became my favorite part of the game.

Wrapping Up

I spent the last few days as I normally do: on a dozen tasks all at once. This included…

• Adding menus
• Squashing bugs
• Tweaking sound effects with Matt
• Adding the ending
• Music implementation and timing
• Playtesting with my roommates and brothers
• Smoothing the transition between the menu, ending, credits, and game.

Of course, Matt and Shaun did a truck-load of work too. (Beyond character and level design, Shaun designed and wrote the whole high score front and back end!) But I’ll let them talk about it in our upcoming podcast. :)