The Switch

Side-on platformer style view, very stark orange and black art style, rusty, nasty.

Your character and one other are slave labourers in a big, dilapidated factory of extremely dangerous machines. In a short, wordless intro:

Scene 1

• A machine malfunctions and cuts your arm off
• The guards ignore you
• Your partner loses it and attacks a guard
• The guard beats them
• You try to help but collapse
• You’re both overpowered dragged away
• Your partner grabs something from the production line just as we fade to black

Scene 2

• The guard drags you both, throws you into a chamber with blackened walls
• Your stump is bandaged in a shirt but still bleeding
• Just before your cell door closes, your partner throws something into your cell that clatters on the floor.
• Your partner is thrown into a similar chamber opposite
• When the guard walks away, there’s a small green light stuck to him
• Faintly visible gas floods your partner’s cell with a hiss
• It suddenly ignites in dazzling orange flame, then fades: nothing is left
• When you pick up the object you get a prompt: “Right mouse: Switch”
• The same gas floods into your cell
• If you flick the switch, you and the guard instantly switch places: he’s incinerated and you’re free
• If you don’t it is a short game

The Game

The Switch is a slim metal cylinder with a simple lever switch on the end. It now has something attached to the bottom: the Tag, a thin disc with the feel of a fridge magnet.

Left click throws the Tag. It sticks to whatever it hits, but the Switch only works if it’s stuck to a human: the things it switches need to be similar in mass and composition. It’s light enough that they won’t feel anything if they didn’t see you throw it, and you don’t have to be nearby or in line of sight to press Right mouse and switch places with them.

Once the tag is thrown, Left clicking again teleports it back to you without switching.

So it’s a stealth puzzle game about quietly tagging enemies, then purposefully throwing or trapping yourself into fatal hazards and switching at the last minute. The factory is a complete deathtrap: you’ll stand under smashing pistons, throw yourself into grinding gears, jump onto rusty sawblades, lock yourself in trash compactors, drop onto conveyor belts too fast to run against, walk off sheer drops, and dive onto safety railings have decayed into javelins of rust. The idea is invert the idea of avoiding death, and to make you feel a little of what you’re about to inflict: that physical wince just before you die of something unsettlingly physical in a videogame, like a long fall or heavy object.

Your task is to escape, obviously, and along the way you’ll mostly be using the Switch to get guards out of your way. In some situations, though, guards can also double as ‘lives’: tag one before attempting to navigate a tricky part of the factory, and if you slip and fail you can Switch to put him in your place and get another go. In those situations and others, killing isn’t strictly necessary, and if you’re trying to minimise it you’ll have to decide whether you want to set up that murderous contingency plan in case it comes to it.

Obviously there are thematic similarities with The Swapper, but both the tech and usage are different: that game was about cloning yourself, the Switch is just a teleporter. It’s about doing horribly suicidal and reckless things to yourself and using your unconventional weapon to transfer the consequences to others. Which is also why it needs a nasty intro and a persistent reminder of your desperate circumstances.

Previously: I came up with ideas for 8 previous game jams, 3 of which I actually made – Scanno Domini, Jake and the Infinite Jerkbots, and Floating Point. You can read about them all and play those three by browsing the game jams tag here.

Episode 5 just came out tonight, and it’s me and artist/designer Liselore Goedhart making SimAntics: Realistic Anteater Simulator. We were given the theme of ‘Simulation’ by previous jammers Cactus and Grapefrukt, and told not to make SimAnt. So we simulated an anteater instead.

You can grab it from Steam here, where there’s also a trailer. Stills below, and thoughts on the episode at the end!

My first stab at generating ant tunnels, and letting the mouse steer a tongue down them.

Lizzy draws on paper and then traces over photos of her sketches in Illustrator with a mouse.

Late night coding, beer and a carrot.

Recording sound-effects: my anteater’s munching noise is me eating an apple, Lizzy’s is her eating a cracker.

First multiplayer test. Game is suddenly fun!

And has Lizzy’s art, so 100x cuter.

Debriefing.

I was super nervous to watch this back, because I didn’t see it at all until it was publicly released on Steam. And watching yourself on video is always hard. But it wasn’t as painful as I thought! Mostly I just laugh a lot, which gives the accurate impression that the whole thing was just a lot of fun.

In some of the earlier episodes of the series, I sometimes struggled to get an idea of what the game was from the episode itself. Blossom, for example, turned out to have way more elements and ideas than I’d guessed from what Dominik and Christoffer were talking about as they made it.

Watching ours back, I feel like it gives a fairly good idea of what we’re making? But then I know everything about what we were making, so I can’t really judge. If you get it, I’d be interested to hear if it was followable.

Update: we don’t have a trailer for the game, but here’s a short clip of me playing in single-player just to give you an idea of what it looks like moving.

My game about swinging through randomly generated spaces has spilled out from a game jam entry, to a four-day game, to a week-long game. This is a series of three video blogs talking about interesting things that happened in its design.

Here’s my previous video showing the game itself.

Update: it actually took five weeks, but now it’s done and out and on Steam and free and half a million people played it! More info on the tag.

This weekend, though, I’m letting myself do one. Because a) I made loads of progress on Gunpoint last weekend, and am very close to being able to show you a new feature I haven’t announced yet, and b) this will probably be the only chance I ever get to legally make an Adventure Time game.

It’s the Fantastic Arcade Game Making Frenzy, and this year’s theme is Pendleton Ward’s amazing cartoon Adventure Time. Pendleton himself gives the bizarre opening talk, and the organisers say you’re allowed to use any Adventure Time assets in your games.

I want to make a game where you play as Jake, the magical stretchy dog, and have to co-operate with an AI-controlled Finn. It’s 11am on day one, and here’s what I have so far.

I’ll update this post as I go.

1pm. Goddamn it.

4.30pm.Got the main ability in there. I love Finn and Jake’s relationship on the show, so I want to make a game where you’re constantly helping each other out. This is how you help Finn:

How Finn helps you is what I’m working on next. Trying to figure out a way to represent it that doesn’t need too many frames of animation, because these sprites take a while to make.

9.15pm. Paint Shop Pro 9 – at this point in my life, it’s easier to learn a foreign language than a new image editor.

Most of the rest of the stuff I’ve done since 4 is making what I showed you at 4 actually work when you play around with it. In that build nothing was even solid to Jake. Now it’s got gravity, collision, and feels quite nice to mess around with.

Hoping to get some rudimentary combat in today – if I do, that leaves me with loads of time tomorrow for making levels, enemies and systems, which is where it might get really cool.

10.20pm. Yep!

As you can see, it’s not particularly robust yet. But the main thing I needed to know was whether I can get away with just two frames of animation for Finn’s combat, and I reckon I can. For a while, it was looking like animating Finn was going to be game-scuttlingly difficult, so that’s a relief.

Day Two

Lost a lot of time to three brutally difficult bugs today, but it all finally clicked together a few hours ago. Here’s a vid of one short level:

The enemies are robots that have stolen some of Jake’s… junk, so Jake gets more junk when they’re killed, and can stretch further.

Just after making this I got a random level generator working, and I’ve just made it so that the random levels get harder (and taller) as you play. Next I want to get some text-dialogue in there, then sound effects.

1.55am. Done! It’s called Jake and the Infinite Jerkbots, and you can download it from that link and play it now.

The fewer updates on Day 2 was directly proportional to the rising desperation to get certain things working – in other words, no time to blog. I’ll make one last video at some point, but right now I’d really like to eat and then sleep, so I’ll just give you a screenshot:

I think if you’re going to make an evolution game, you’ve got to actually model evolution. God knows gaming misuses that word enough – we need to repay science for every time a game has claimed some magical goo caused our character to ‘rapidly evolve’ into a superhuman.

I can’t think of a good way to put the player in direct control of that process, because that process is pretty much defined by the lack of direct control. Spore is a good example of what’s not good enough in this context: the player chooses how his creature ‘evolves’, making it essentially a game about intelligent design.

So how about enemies that evolve? That keeps the theme nice and close to the central experience: you’re always going to be thinking about and dealing with enemies, so anything that governs their behaviour and traits is going to be super important to you.

It also suits a game’s natural difficulty curve: you want it to start easy and get harder, which fits well with enemies that start dumb and get better at fighting you. But how would we measure ‘good at fighting the player’? And why would that lead to that enemy reproducing? When and why would you end up fighting its offspring?

You can fudge those questions, but you don’t want to stray too far from how evolution actually works, or again, your game ends up just evolution-flavoured rather than genuinely about the mechanics of it. I tried to think of an idea that doesn’t need a lot of fudging for evolution to fit with it, one where the evolution mechanic doesn’t have to be dressed up or reworked from what it naturally is. The best I could come up with was this:

Slumber

You play a beast lying in a vast, dark cave. Roaming around the cave are lots of much smaller glowing creatures, each slightly different. As soon as you move, they all realise you’re awake and run like hell.

Any time you get near one, a sticky web emits from your body and ensnares them. You can eat them quickly and easily. As you do, a meter fills up: you’ve got to eat about 80% of the population to fill it. When you do, your movements slow to a stop, and you fall asleep. For forty years.

In time-lapse, you see the cave repopulating. Each creature has its own values for Speed, Strength, and Resilience: random pairs of the survivors reproduce, having ten children each before they die. The children inherit a mix of their parents stats, but each child has a chance to be better at one particular stat. If they are, one or all of their others will be reduced, so their total is the same.

By the time you wake, all of the original survivors have died off, and only their children remain. Again, you’ve got to eat 80% of the population in order to return to your slumber. It’s probably the fastest who survived your last attack, so this generation will probably be a bit faster.

After a few slumber/feast cycles, you develop the power to shoot your web-strings at fleeing prey to ensnare them. The strongest creatures can pull themselves free before you reach them. So in this generation, strength is more important than speed.

After a few more, your webbing becomes acidic, slowly killing prey it catches. Now Resilience is a factor: even amongst the strong, only the toughest live long enough to have a chance of freeing themselves.

From then on, every few cycles you can choose which of your abilities to improve: speed, web production, web acidity. This is not evolution, it’s just your development as a maturing creature. But you can choose these to counteract the dominant traits of the prey population – produce webs faster if they’re all too fast and getting away from you too quickly. And the population will, of course, evolve in response, as only the best at avoiding you will live to produce the next generation.

You could even have a ‘Social’ trait for the prey, which determines their willingness to help trapped friends out of webs. And maybe a fear pheromone for yourself, to counter-act it. You could intentionally kill everything with webs for a few generations, to see if the Speed trait starts to decline as it no longer offers an advantage, so offspring who lose it in favour of other traits start to do better and better. Then feast on the slow generation.

Also there’d be unlockable hats.

Top-down, space. You control a vast mothership, bigger than any sun, drifting through a dense system of planets and stars. Hovering your cursor over tiny planets scans them, and after a short delay, reports whether any of your people are captive there or not.

As you pass, the tiny planets launch even tinier capital ships at you, zapping at you with tiny weapons but doing no actual damage. You can destroy these with your giant main laser, but it’ll also obliterate any planet in its path, so you have to be a bit careful.

Once you’ve found a planet with some captives on it, you’ve got to wipe out all the capital ships, then you can right click on it to “Launch Craft”.

A tiny pixel of black leaves the body of your ship and flies towards the planet. When it gets there, cut to:

Top down, globe view. You control a vast black disc of a ship as whole nations drift beneath you, their cities and roads sparkling orange at night. (It’s night because you attacked from the opposite side to the sun.)

The cities launch squadrons of fighter jets against you, which do a little damage to your craft if not destroyed with your main laser. Holding the cursor over a city scans it for captives. When you find some, and you’ve cleared the skies, you can right click on that city to “Launch Craft”.

A tiny pixel of black leaves the body of your ship and flies towards the city. When it gets there, cut to:

Side-on, cityscape view. You control a large black dropship zooming above the rooftops. (The sunset’s orange because that’s the colour of the nearest star.)

Soldiers shoot homing missiles at you from their rooftops, which do significant damage if they hit. You can fry them with your main laser, and burn missiles out of the air, but the beam soon destroys any buildings behind. Hovering the cursor over a building slows your ship for a moment to scan it for captives. If you find some, and the soldiers are all dead, you can right click on it to “Launch Craft”.

A black missile shoots from your ship, slamming into the wall of the building. Cut to:

Side-on, building cross-section. You control a small, flying, baby-squid-like alien, hovering through the building’s floors. (The building is purple. That is random.)

Security personnel fire automatic weapons at you, which kill if they hit. You can fry them with your brain laser, and burn holes through the floors of the building.

On one floor, you see the Captives: others of your species kept in glass jars for military experiments. Once you get to them, you have to destroy their tanks with your laser, then blast your way through the wall to get out.

If you die at any point up to here, we cut back to the previous stage and another craft is launched. If you die after this point, we cut back to the mothership and the captives on this planet are lost.

Assuming you get out, we cut to:

Cityscape. The dropship picks you up from the building, but now the streets are crawling with soldiers. You have to shoot down incoming missiles from all directions while you lift off to the top of the screen. Cut to:

Globe. Fighters have scrambled from all over the planet to intercept you, and their combined fire is lethal if you don’t cut their numbers down with your laser. As long as you survive, the disc of your ship grows larger and larger until it fills the screen and we cut to:

Space. No sound but the quiet hum of the mothership. The planet launches more capital ships if you don’t destroy it, but they can’t scratch you. You drift on, scanning for more captives.

A bunch of people asked if they or someone else could make this – yes! I hereby waive all rights to this thing and chuck it into the public domain, anyone can do anything with it.

The theme is decided by a vote, and ‘Alone’ won. However, ‘Kitten’ was also in the final round. It got more down-votes than any other theme, but I can’t help wanting to combine the two. Here’s my idea:

Top down view of snowy tundra. You are a badly drawn TINY KITTEN that scampers towards the mouse cursor, kicking up snow and leaving messy pawprints. It’s a zero button game: all you do is move the mouse.

If you stray far from where you start, you’ll run into a villager or two. They stop when they see you, and run to the north if you approach. They’re faster than you, so you can never catch up to them.

The further north you go, the more villagers you’ll see. They all run away to a village to the north, but if you get close to the village itself, they’ll flee that too. If you chase them, you’ll reach a cliff edge. The villagers will stop at the threshold, but if you come close enough they’ll throw themselves over to get away from you.

The other side of the ravine is a sheer wall of ice, in which you see blurry reflections of the villagers you’re chasing into the chasm. But your own reflection is wrong: far too big, dark and spiky. A rough silhouette of that more monstrous shape appears over your usual badly-drawn kitten avatar, and gets stronger the longer you spend in the presence of your reflection. Eventually, the kitten fades away entirely and you see yourself as the monster you are.

After that, there’s a small chance you’ll encounter smaller villagers who can’t run as fast as you. If you get close to one, you automatically pounce on it and rip it to shreds in a spray of blood, and you’re unable to control yourself until you finish devouring its remains. After that, any time your cursor is directly over a villager, you’ll accelerate to chase it down and eat it. The more you eat, the faster your hunting speed.

If you do kill a villager, there’s now a chance that the villagers you meet in future will throw rocks at you before running away. The more you kill, the more will try to fight you. The rocks knock you back very slightly, so if more than a couple are pelting you, you can’t catch up to them and have to run away.

After the first few, rock hits will make you bleed steadily, leaving a trail of blood in the snow. The bleeding stops if you eat a villager. If you don’t stop the bleeding, your monstrous image starts to fade and the kitten returns, still bleeding.

If you leave the villagers alone, or you kill them all, you’ll end up alone in the snow. After a while alone, your beast appearance fades and you start to see yourself as a kitten again. The screen gets darker as night closes in, and the kitten starts to tremble and turn blue. Eventually, its scampering slows to an unsteady crawl, it lies down, goes still, and is lost in the dark blue snow as darkness closes in.

Gunpoint’s at too exciting a stage right now to take time off from it. If I was making a game about Escape this weekend, though, here’s what it’d be.

You’re a small escape pod with a single thruster, jetting around an infinite randomly generated space. Planets of randomly generated size attract you with their gravitational pull. If you land on one, you’ll find your thruster isn’t powerful enough to let you escape.

You can, however, press down to burrow through the crust of the planet into its gooey core. Your pod automatically sucks up the molten minerals in the centre of the planet to use as fuel. The bigger the planet, the more intensely its fuel burns, and therefore the more powerful your thruster can get if you suck up its whole core. It’s just enough power to escape the gravitational pull of a planet this size, so from now on you can escape any planet that isn’t bigger than this one without boring to its core.

As soon as you start sucking up a planet’s core, though, it becomes unstable and will soon explode. It also gets lighter, reducing its gravitational pull. You have to judge how long you can afford to keep sucking up its core before you need to start escaping. The longer you suck, the more powerful your thruster and the weaker the gravitation pull it has to overcome, but the closer you get to the planet’s detonation.

You have to leave the crust through the hole you made on your way in, or take a second to drill a new one. Provided you get outside the fatal radius in time, you can ride the blast wave of the explosion for a speed boost that’ll last till you next hit a planet, or thrust in a different direction.

You’re trying to get to the galactic core, a direction indicated on-screen, by progressively increasing your thruster power and armour to increase speed and skip more and more planets on the way. You want to get there to suck the whole thing up and use it as fuel to escape spacetime or whatever THE END.

If you do play it, I’d love to know what you thought of it – I’ve been really surprised by the feedback so far.

This version fixes a few significant bugs I didn’t have time to test during the compo – the competition version will stay as it is for judging purposes, of course, I’m just putting this up for anyone who wants to have fun with it. The key changes are:

• Choice of resolutions – anything up to 1920×1200. The game will remember your choice and not ask you again.
• Fixed a crash relating to being able to fire while dead. Duhhh.
• Fixed a bug preventing enemies from sensing when you shoot or touch them – they now turn to try and find you.
• Fixed a lot of erratic behaviour with the scanner – it’ll now scan all the new tech the bot has in one go.
• Fixed a problem with bot behaviour that made The Ominous Event extremely hard to recover from – they’ll wander off on their own once you’re down now.
• Fixed a bug causing some bots to spawn ‘blind’, with no vision cone. It was kind of cute, but causing problems down the line.

Sometime after Christmas, I think I may try a 48 hour sprint with Gunpoint. Getting so much done in such a short time is exhilarating, and it could really use a burst of progress to get it to a point where it makes sense.

Rather embarrassed about Gunpoint now. It could probably be done in a week.

The finished game is pretty much what I planned: a top-down shooter with randomised enemies, whose randomised bits you can steal for yourself. I didn’t end up scaling much dynamically, except the gun sizes. I couldn’t find a way to make it look right in the time, so it was quicker – even for me – to draw a few engine and weapon types. The differences are more immediately interesting, too – “Ooh, blue plasma?”

Number one thing that went right was definitely time management. I had two days, so I picked something I thought I might just about be able to do in one. It was done in one and a half, so I had that crucial half day to take a working concept, find the fun, and make the game about that.

I don’t know if I actually made it fun, but it’s so much closer than it would have been if I’d picked a more ambitious idea and only just got the basics hammered out. This is my first finished game, and given the time limit I thought I’d end up with something a lot more half-baked.

It is buggy, and its tutorial is just gibberish, but in an ideal circumstance it’s conceivable that it could convey to you what you need to know. Oh, except that you have to press R to restart.

Thing that went least well was trouble shooting. I’m rarely good at this, but on the scanning ray in particular I just went out of my mind. It’s still buggy – won’t always scan everything there is to scan on your first scan – and I may have messed up other things in the last minute fixes.

I said I was going to leave graphics till last, but in the end I decided it was worth a stab at them if I gave myself a hard time limit. I basically managed to turn the visuals from offensively ugly to merely very crude. I’m OK with crude. There’s just a particular look to very bad graphics that’s not endearing or ignorable or in any way OK, and I had to try to avoid that.

I also took time to put in sounds for almost everything important, and I’m really glad I did. I knew they’d be important to the feel, but I didn’t quite appreciate how important the feel would be to the overall thing. It’s not an art game, it’s not very brave or inventive, so it really needs to have some decent ‘pew pew!’s in.

I have exactly no time tomorrow to polish this up and also submit it to the jam, the less strict contest that gives an extra day. Which is a shame, because it needs a few bandages to hold it together properly, and a few basic human rights like a choice of resolutions. I will do those things, just not right away. For now, I am done.

Thanks for all the comments, support and puns.

But the two tiny changes you do see represent pretty much everything else I needed to get done for the game to make sense: you can now scan enemies when they’re not looking to steal the details of their weapons, then use that info to rebuild their guns, shields and engines when they’re dead.

I’m happy I’ve got to this point, but there’s a lot more to do. I have a choice of a few fairly major areas to work on, and I’ll list them in my current priority order:

• Player guidance: Even in an ultra quick experimental game I don’t think this step is remotely skippable. If I don’t get a few basic tutorial messages in to explain how to play the game, no amount of readmes will ever make up for it.
• Balance: Bots of random strength spawn in random positions. So that kinda sucks. I just need a few lines of code to make weaker ones spawn near the player, tougher ones further away, and to make certain configurations excitingly rare. This’ll have a big effect on how much fun it is to play.
• Environment: I’d like to add water around the edges to make this an island, and possibly a fortress wall at the top.
• Objective: Right now there’s no long term objective. Ideally I’d like to have you scanning and stealing parts until you’re strong enough to assualt a fortified wall to the north and escape.
• Graphics: I must at least make some proper plasma blasts, and ideally add explosion effects and a better player bot. I also need to take one more go at making snow look less awful – I’d like to make it grainy and randomise the ‘dunes’ a bit.
• Extra feature: scale. I’d really like to have double- and half-size bots roaming around, with accordingly different toughness and speed.

The reason graphics is so low is that the time it takes is such a wildcard – sometimes I get something bad right away, other times it takes me hours to make something bad.

Let me know if you think my priority order is nuts.

Current title idea: Scanno Domini. Other scan puns welcome.

The main thing is randomised enemies, with visually apparent stats. Randomisation will be part of the Discovery element, and also just the fun of the game: it’s never going to be a great shooter, but it’s already kind of cool to blunder into a triple-barreled deathbot with hyper speed and discover a whole new echelon of boned.

The visual apparency – representing every stat in the shape of the enemy rather than a stats readout – is part of that too. It gives your read on the enemies immediacy, and that’s a catalyst for fun. I need all of those I can get. Hopefully you can tell which one of these enemies has more firepower, and which one is better protected.

What you can’t see, and what you probably won’t even find if you play it, is the ridiculous amount of fun I’m having with it.

Most of this afternoon was spent thrashing out the enemy movement to be more convincing and dangerous, and all of this evening was spent drawing just a few bad sprites – it takes me actual time to get pixel art to the dismal level of quality you see here.

Then in less than half an hour, I did the coding legwork to implement every chunk of art into modularly assembled, dynamically scaled, randomised deathbots. And the game’s gone from being a tame arena where I can always win through knowing the tricks, to a terrifying robot safari where things with crazy muzzle velocities can also outrun me, and I see combinations I hadn’t pictured.

It’s not exactly good, yet, but it’s an amazing thrill to see that kind of stuff come to life from a few simple maths statements. I can pretty much stomach art work if it’s for a game that can stretch and recombine it to endless different purposes.

I’ve also had an idea for how to relate the game more obviously to the Discovery theme. It’s fun to try and creep up on these bots when they’re not looking. They turn round if you shoot them, to prevent the game being too easy, but I’m going to make it so that you can subtly scan them if you get up close and undetected.

If they have a module you’ve never used before, you’ll gain the ability to salvage it if you later kill the bot. And if they don’t, you’ll be able to read their robo-thoughts. Not entirely sure what I’m going to do with that, but even if it’s just an array of pointless introspection it should be fun to write.

Secondly, now that I’ve made enough of it to see what it’s going to be like, I realise it has almost nothing to do with the theme. The angry deathbots you meet aren’t randomised yet, but even once they are I think running into them is just going to feel like encountering enemies in an arena. It technically is discovery, but because they’re simply off-screen rather than visibly obfuscated, it’s not going to feel like it.

I’m not going to worry about that too much yet – my priority order is to make it interesting, then make it good, then make it fit the theme. Here’s what it looks like now:

The blue circles are shields: I didn’t fancy putting a bunch of work in just to recreate the conventional hitpoint bar or health meter on your interface, so I went for something more visual and in-fiction. Right now each shield takes one hit, but as you can see that makes you impractically large for not much health, so I’ll probably tighten their size and thickness before I’m done, and perhaps make them come back online a while after they’re taken out.

The enemy will have these as well, and they’re one of the things that’ll be randomised, so it’ll be very obvious when you’re facing something tough. Not sure if I’ll also have big hulls – that’d mean introducing an armour system as well, which may defeat the point of the shields.

I do plan to have large engines/tracks for fast bots, and a large turret or power core of some kind for things with a lot of firepower. Basically, if I can have at least three functionally important metrics that enemies can vary in, and make each one visually readable at a glance without any interface, I’ll be close to what I want.

Challenges right now:

• You’re in a fairly large open field of snow, and I’m not sure where to take the environments from there. I’d love it to be infinite but that’s technically tricky. I’d also love some randomly placed obstacles, but I’m wary of creating much art work for myself – I want time to redo the actual robots.
• My control method didn’t work: holding the mouse button to make your bot chase it was fun, but it meant you’d never be able to fire in one direction while moving in another. I’ve changed it to Cannon Fodder controls – click to move, right click to shoot somewhere else while you’re on your way. It doesn’t feel quite right with current movement speed and screen size – you’re at your destination before you’ve got more than a couple of shots off. May rethink.
• Random enemy movement was trickier than I thought. I’ve done it, but they’re rather geriatric: quivering with indecision when deciding where to move. I’ve realised the way to make it look better is have them pick an arbitrary direction, turn, then move. But that’s also the way every other game does it, so I’m still wondering if there’s a more interesting way.

Title ideas: Sighs of the Snowbots? Snowbot Snores?

It is the ugliest game ever made, but it works – the robot chases your cursor while you hold the mouse button, and decelerates when you release it.

Obviously with 48 hours to make something, you start to look at what really takes time, and the answer is invariably ‘tweaking’. So I made a pact with myself: no tweaking till the game is virtually done: of graphics, movement, controls, anything. I’m allowed to change things once or twice to get them functional, then they’re set in stone until the rest of the thing is in place.

I have two days, so my plan is to make the game in one. That way I can spend the second day making it good, or making up for how badly I failed to meet this ridiculous deadline on the first. My game is going to be crude and ugly no matter what, so I’m happy to make it even cruder and uglier to give myself some time to balance it and make it more fun.

In my head, this meant getting a character moving around the world in the morning, then making content in the afternoon. Turns out the first part only really took an hour, two with all the faffing with all the blogging and setting up screen captures for the time-lapse video I’m hoping to make of this process.

So next up is putting an enemy in the world, and letting the two shoot each other. Video games.

Discovery is what I was hoping for. I think one of the close runners up, Containment, would probably have led to a more interesting selection of games, but I had a clearer idea of what I’d do for Discovery. I knew if this one ended up being picked, I would have to make something involving randomised content. That’s what makes Spelunky so exciting to play, and that’s probably the greatest game about discovery I’ve ever played.

Unfortunately I’m not Derek Yu, and I only have 42 hours, and I’m wasting time writing a blog. So my game will be a little less ambitious.

To fit the theme, I feel like the pleasure of the game has to have something to do with the discovering. And the only thing gamers truly and instinctively care about is stuff that benefits them in the game. So not only does it have to be the content rather than just the scenery that is randomised, the unique elements of that content have to feed back into character progression in some way.

My plan currently is for something top down, where you direct your character – probably a robot – around a large landscape with the mouse, encountering enemies with randomised stats. Destroying them will let you salvage some of their traits, so a very tough enemy would boost your hitpoints when you destroy it.

Someone on the Ludum Dare site joked that everyone should not only have to stick to the chosen theme, but also combine it with Christmas. So if I can draw it in any meaningful way, I’ll set my game in the snow.

I’ll be using Game Maker, Paint.net and an amazing program I only just discovered while reading the Ludum Dare rules: sfxr. It generates sound effects according to some sliders you set, and you only have to click the preset buttons a few times to realise this or something similar is where all Spelunky’s sounds must have come from.

When you enter Ludum Dare, you can decide to go for the competition, or the jam. In the compo, everything must be your own work and the theme is not optional. Those games are rated by participants in various categories. In the jam, you can work in teams, take an extra day over it, and the rules are pretty loose – you just won’t be judged.

Unless the theme is awful, I’ll be going for the competition. Right now it looks like the forerunners for theme are Discovery, Depth and Containment, which I like a little, not much, and a lot, respectively. I thought I’d be okay with any theme, but some of the finalists are stuff like “Text input action game”, “Game based on a year” and, no kidding, “Don’t die”. If it’s any of those, I will almost entirely ignore them and maybe just go in for the jam.

I’ll probably blog my progress, and try to do a time lapse video. I may end up with nothing – I’m not fast, experienced, or good at judging scope yet, and I plan to eat, sleep and take breaks. My God have mercy on my soul.

I didn’t enter, though lots of absolute beginners do, and it’s the sort of thing I love. But while I now feel capable of starting a small project like that, I don’t feel capable of finishing one in any kind of time. I was also pretty goddamn determined to get elevators working in Gunpoint by Monday, because four days on that is just kind of sad.

But I did have an idea for one. I think I like the competition’s theme because it’s suggests changing the state of enemies in a more interesting way than from alive to dead. Either to make them accidentally destroy things you want destroyed, as in games where you shove them into something or dodge their attacks, or to turn them to your side.

My game would be called Defect and Serve, and it’d be about bent cops. You’re a criminal who’s just been caught, unarmed, during an elaborate bank job. The arresting officer hints that he’d let you go for a hundred grand, and while he’d like to just take it from you, if you’re dead or caught there’ll be no explanation for the missing money.

Your only option is to pay up – tossing the money to him in bundles of $50,000 by clicking. Above his head is a meter labelled “Principles:” followed by two blue pips, and each bundle of cash makes one of them explode in a little shower of bills. When they’re both gone, he leaves and heads for the opposite end of the building.

It’s from a top-down view, and once that cop leaves you’re free to figure out a route to the exit avoiding the other roaming police. Each has a number of Principles pips, usually between 1 and 10. It’s possible to get out without running into anyone else, but if you do, you’re rooted to the spot and must chuck them a $50k bundle for each pip of Principles they have before you can go.

Once you’re out, the next levels are a series of heists where you start with limited funds, and make your way to vaults and safes to get more. Your objective is to steal more money than you spend bribing, obviously, so you avoid the very Principled cops like the plague.

A few levels in, you’re told you can also toss some extra cash to a cop after you’ve already turned him. This creates a red Loyalty pip, and if you give him as much Loyalty as he had Principles, you can order him to radio an all clear to the rest of the cops, making your current location safe for a while.

If you can double a cop’s Principles in Loyalty pips, you can actually click on another cop to order him killed. The turned cop will head for him, but won’t strike until the two of them are on their own. It’s up to you whether to distract or bribe the other guards to help him achieve that, or get on with sneaking through the building and hope he has the chance at some point.

Eventually you will encounter the odd White Knight cop, who’s impervious to bribes. If he’s guarding your objective, your only option is to have him killed. At this point cops with low principles become essential tools rather than minor threats, and you’ll actively try and run into one on his own so you can turn him to your side. Once you have, it’s worth intentionally alerting the White Knight to lure him away from colleagues, giving your turncoats the chance to take him out without getting caught.

I’m actually enjoying sticking with Gunpoint, it’s just impossible to resist coming up with a concept for a theme like that. I’ll probably have another Gunpoint progress report soon – I’m close to another milestone involving the AI, and I’ll be in a good position to figure out what kind of challenges are going to be fun in this frame work.

Even as it rapidly approaches an actual game, it seems to be getting further and further from the story-heavy finished article I had in mind when I started. I pictured it story-heavy because writing is trivial, but I’m starting to realise scripting is not. And it’s a low value type of work, only really good for one play through, and little to do with the medium’s strengths. I’m starting to wonder if there’s another type of content I can use to link a bunch of puzzles, or a more efficient way to convey story without visually depicting a lot of non-interactive events.

roBurky’s game, I think untitled, lets you convert enemies to your side or blow them up in a chain reaction.

Alien Abduction of Aliens, a simple grab-and-throw game that’s beautifully drawn, and even more beautifully named.

Sophie Houlden’s excellent Fib, in which saying “Basil said John is ass balls” is a valid puzzle solution. You lie to people to trick them into killing themselves, so that you can safely walk on their corpses.

The end game of the competition’s winner, Fail Deadly. It’s a smart and immediately fun subversion of an RTS where you build both side’s bases in an attempt to keep them evenly matched long enough for nuclear war to break out, killing everyone.