Indies vs Pewdiepie Game Jam Update #2!

Few! It’s over. Those were three really intense days – especially Sunday (non-stop development from 8 AM to 12 AM, except for a brief running break).

Unfortunately, I didn’t actually finish a game.

I finished a very promising prototype of a game that implemented a whole bunch of new tools and ideas I’ve never been able to use before. But I didn’t actually finish a game.

Here it is on GameJolt: Super ‘Splosion Fun Time Go!!!

The game’s a half-baked mess, but it’s got good parts:

• The under-the-hood AI and character control system are really solid and flexible
• A complex implementation of Esoteric Software’s Spine runtime let me make some really cool procedural animations
• The art I was able to finish is (for the most part) high-quality and stylistically unified

I also recorded 19 hours of twitch footage which I’m using to make a timelapse of the entire development process. (It’s really cool to watch an empty source file explode into a 2D-shooter over the course of 7 minutes. The video is sped up by something like 120 times.)

Would I do this again? Maybe. But I’d do a few things very differently:

• Keep the features list to a minimum, and take a very rational, this-is-cool-but-we-probably-won’t-have-time-for-this approach to cutting from the final design document.
• Solidify game mechanics before art. It doesn’t matter if your game looks pretty if it doesn’t play well.
• If possible, I’d work in a team. I might have finished this project if I had had twice as much time to split between art and code – or if I had had another person sharing part of the workload. (Double productivity = more possibilities.)

Have I learned anything? Not really, or at least not anything life-changing. But I do have a cool base project to work from and the beginnings of some very high-quality art assets I could potentially sell on the GameMaker Marketplace. And I’ve also gained a few YouTube subscribers from my Update videos. (I think the timelapse will really bring in views once it’s uploaded.)

It’s been a crazy weekend – thanks for coming for the ride.

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