Post-Jam Goodies

Blurb

I'm not gonna go into too much depth like my last dev log, so this post-mortem will be more like a view into what was planned during the jam but didn't make it.

If you haven't played this game yet, play it! This article does have spoilers for it's gameplay and monsters but it's not really a plot based game. If you don't know what I'm talking about, it's a little game I made in three(ish) days for Mini Jam 150: Magic. (Go check out some other games from the jam too if you'd like.)

Original Idea

I didn't actually plan on doing the jam when it first started, I just slept and woke up because I couldn't really think of anything. I did see the theme and limitation (Magic and Light is the way.) but only really thought of the game the morning after(I did take a day past when submissions started for some more implementation and polish.) I started to think of magic and light, and thought immediately of Clerics! Then I wondered why clerics in RPGs use maces. The answer I thought of was of course, delivering light magic straight into your enemies.

So then I immediately thought of how the game would play, hitting a ball of light, and smashing it like a baseball, and then summoning it back, like an FPS! Then imagined a Cleric who was left alone in a dungeon with no spells left, but a single ball of light! The game I was picturing at this point was a fast-paced one where you were combo-ing enemies left and right with a spell and mace. One idea I wanted to theme the game around was that the patron deity left them, but a demon or god of violence gave them a blessing or something (Maybe they would have said things like HOME RUN! or BRUTAL! etc.). But I couldn't really explore that due to the scope of time I had for this jam. That's in the future if this game ever gets a full version.

Cool Tech

• Binary space partitioning for Dungeon Generation
  • I really wanted to use a much more robust system with varied rooms but I stuck with the simplest design I could make.
• Texture swapping for fake lighting
  • I'm not a big fan of default/preset lighting but I'm also not as adept at tinkering with post-processing, rendering techniques, or shaders, so I'm glad I could figure out this texture swap for fake lighting.

Emergent Mechanics

Some cool gameplay tricks I found while playtesting my own game.

• The lanterns protect your light from being instantly eaten from the Lighteaters. Originally I was just gonna have the lanterns be places where you can put your light into to be brighter, but the AI of the Lighteaters + lantern mechanic combined for this neat little mechanic.
• Lantern refreshing! Magic Lights have a health bar of their own, that depletes when they get attacked, or damage an enemy through high speed collision. But with lanterns, if you hit a lantern, it gets absorbed, and when it gets recalled, it refreshes health! You can also do this with your "personal" hovering light mode too.
• You can block the Lighteater's light using your own light. Then hit it back at them! It won't do anything though.
• Animation cancelling using combos. Hitting a combo means you can immediately start the next combo chain.
• You can charge the Lighteater, and have them shoot a Living Armor in the back.

Concepts during Development

I was originally struggling to draw the monsters.

I kept making them cute. Too cute to have to destroy with a mace. So I had to phone a friend on how to make them creepy! He came back with a bunch of neat ideas after I told him the premise of the game. Thanks, Hunter.

Mace Attack Animation

I'm not a big animator. Or a digital artist. I originally wanted to draw mace attack animations, (with the hand visible) but that sort of efficiency during the jam wasn't going to cut it. So what I did was take a video of a mace-like object (I stuck a plastic bottle at the end of a metal rod), then put that in blender, use and pose the public mace model from Sketchfab I found and use the reference images as "frames" for an animation.

I also wanted a summon & recall animation showing the hand spawning the magic light and calling it back, but again, making a polished hand animation with multiple frames is quite the time sink.

That's it!

That's pretty much all of the concepts! I'm not too sure of how good of a concept this game idea is yet, so it isn't the highest priority. If you'd like to see this be made into a full version with the narrator demon + combo system, add a comment here or on the game's page.

Thanks for reading.