Wax On, Wax Off

Today, Rusty, Matt, and I met and hashed out our plan of attack for the next few weeks. We’re tentatively scheduled to release the complete version of End of Line around Tuesday, February 5th. The Crunch for Game 2 will start that weekend on Friday, the 8th.

Until then, we polish! To start, Rusty is revamping our level format so we can create more levels in less time. Matt is going to write a couple more songs for later “worlds” and (fingers crossed) boss fights. I’m working on animating new threats (Lasers! Reversible tiles! Elemental pits!) and a handful of different world graphics.

I’ll post some more gifs later today!

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.

End of Line Chaser

Phew! Our first crunch is behind us. You can play End of Line now. It’s short but a sweet start to something longer.

What happens next? We’ll take a few days to recover, absorb the response to the game, and then figure out what direction to take the game in. Once I get some sleep, I have a pre-crunch, post-weekend inbox to tend to. Then I’d like to write a postmortem like I did for Super Clew Land.

This isn’t the last we’ve heard of EOL. (Seriously, Matt wrote soo much music!)

Three Sheets to the Win

Snease

A sneak peak and a tease, all in one!

Achoo!

Piece by Piecemeal

Redesigned the protagonist today. Currently calling him EOL:

Before redesigning him, I actually animated the previous design but I didn’t leave myself enough pixels to do so effectively. Doing the same animations multiple times, I settled into a workflow that I thought was worth sharing.

Step one, animate the head:

Step two, animate the feet:

Step 3, animate the fists:

Step 4, animate the trunk:

Building up the animation in this way helped me focus on the forms and movement most responsible for communicating the action.

This concludes my “5 free minutes while microwaving dinner” update. Less than 48 hours to go!

Immortal, learn to die + Protagonist

Six hours in on our first game and we have a pretty solid direction and the beginnings of a protagonist:

An idle animation:

And here’s a peak at a few stages of the progress:

Heartening

Less than 12 hours remain to pick your favorite themes for our first crunch! We received over 500 usable themes. Because of this surprising volume, we curated a shortlist of 21 themes we found most interesting or just had too many duplicate submissions to ignore. (You can still see and pick from the rest by clicking the See All button.)

Next time, we’ll probably limit theme submissions to 3 per person and increase the duration of both the submission and voting phases.

Lastly, we finally published the final pre-crunch Primer, Sound Off! It’s short but sweet and features a new track (also short but sweet) from Matt called Genki (私は元気です、ありがとう).