End of Line: 72 Hour Postmortem

I had just moved to Austin. My residence wouldn’t have Internet access until after the Jam, so I rented a room on AirBnB to work and sleep at during the three days. The WiFi was a bit shoddy, but tethering to my iPad helped fill in the gaps.

Begin!

Shaun, Matt and I fired up a video chat just as the theme voting ended. Immortal, learn to die. What a great theme! Our brainstorming began and we came up with a dozen crazy ideas. Here are a few of my favorites:

Rite of Succession: You are the youngest of seven princes. Each is immortal, but has one secret weakness. Your oldest brother rules the land with an iron fist. The only way to save the kingdom is to discover his weakness and kill him. Unfortunately each brother is worse than the last, so you eventually kill all six. When the player becomes king, he discover he’s the worst ruler of all. His final challenge: find his own weakness and kill himself. Players would question town folk and perhaps cook poisons.

Lonely Mecha Godzilla: The giant monsters in Tokyo are destroyed. Only Mecha Godzilla remains. Alone and depressed, Mecha seeks a way to end his eternal torment.

Immortal Space Ronin: Your master is dead. You are doomed to walk all of space and time forever. (Or are you?)

While all are fun ideas, interesting gameplay never blossomed from our narrative seeds. After three hours of brainstorming we chose the most developed idea: EOL, a game about a robot trying to thwart mindless repair bots, so he can die.

Getting Started

With a few hours left in the day, I started setting up level loading and world collisions. Shaun began designing our hero, EOL. And, of course, Matt began writing music. By the end of the day the player could move and dash through a level.

Day 2

The repair robots required a bit of AI logic. They needed to repair the player, repair miscellaneous objects, and repair themselves. They needed to accept repair orders and gracefully stop a task if interrupted. So I built a bot manager to delegate work to each bot.

During the day I built most of the game with art from our Primer. But as Shaun’s design of EOL matured, the character sprites were replaced. By the days end, Matt delivered the first couple music tracks.

Day 3

As Shaun continued work on the characters and backgrounds, a faux 3d perspective emerged. While this was cool, it meant all the sprites needed regular sorting, so the images closest to the “camera” appear to be in front. After adding this, I started implementing pathfinding for the hopping repair bots.

Final Hours

With about 12 hours left, Shaun started creating levels. Matt finished writing his seventh(!) piece of music, made a dozen or so sound effects, and began level designing too. I added the music and sound effects to the game, then resumed squashing pathfinding bugs.

With a couple hours to go, the game was christened End of Line. Shaun made a sweet “Game Over” like title screen

During the three-day jam, we continued discussion of the narrative. Why was EOL trying to off himself? Who was controlling the repair bots? Without giving too much away, we came up with an appropriate “to be continued” end screen and added it in the last minutes of the jam.