Another Mini Jam Begins

This game was designed and built for Mini Jam 81. The theme: kaiju. The limitation: death is not the end. In contrast with my previous jams, this time the limitation was my primary source of inspiration. Also in contrast with my previous jams, i had a teammate this time! (10/10 would team again)

I mainly play platformers and metroidvanias, and in those games a death usually just takes you back to the start of a room, or to a checkpoint. But how do you get there? Is it a reversal of time, where the entire lived experience of the character is rewound and forgotten? Unlikely, because games with timers usually still keep track of that elapsed time. So something must be resurrecting the character, actively bringing them back from the dead. Who?

Enter: The Resurrectionist. A supernatural entity tasked with retrieving the corpse of the player and reanimating them. This alone is enough to avoid just having a trivial respawn mechanic, but it raises the question: who resurrects the resurrectionist? Nobody. So if they die, that’s game over.

Day One

An idea in place, a game may form. I’d been wanting to play with a sort of Super Monkey Ball style control scheme for a while, and it seemed easy enough to implement. And it was! I thought. I’d sent off just a simple movement-demo to l3mmy, lacking collisions and everything. Receiving back some very nice art and a bit of a sample level, I realized the flaw in my reasoning. Levels can’t be just, plain rectangular billiards boards! I had to handle running up against the pointy part of a corner. But I didn’t want to, so I did something lazy instead! You might even notice while playing that the diagonal walls accompany fully-solid tiles. Lazy or not, that made for a complete movement script.

Next up: fleshing out the sample level arrangement into something a bit fuller. I left tabs in the code for three enemy types, drew some quick placeholder mockups for a lock and a key, and placed down the elements that I’d need for the first level. There’s one enemy there, and (indeed for all enemies) used its hitball as a sample representation. Oh yeah, “hitball”: literally everything is based on circle colliders. Triangular enemy? Yeah no that’s a circle in disguise.

Quickly made a checkpoint entity with associated tiles, both because it would eventually be needed and to show how i prefer to use the map-editor as a level-editor including entities. Simplistic, and none of the entities actually did anything, but that was enough to send back off!

Day 2

When i awoke at the crack of 13:30 i didn’t much want to get up and work. Had been slightly ill, and bed was cozy. Bed is always cozy, but i do my work on a desktop and that means i can’t work in bed. So eventually, up i got. The first task: actually implement the character swapping! That’s basically the primary mechanic of the game! After a couple hours of sorta half-working on things, we gained a Resurrectionist who, despite using the same movement script as the main character, feels completely different. Spawn a “corpse” on player death, swap characters, make the corpse grabbable, and all’s well. Made a screen-effect for the resurrection and sat back, satisfied with the progress. Seemed that l3mmy liked the effect too :3

Speaking of — they continued making great art for things! And they also went and added some sfx for when you’re rolling. Well, almost anyway, i went and modded the code so it wasn’t just a continuous brrrrrrrrrrrt.

To finish the day off, I added a generic placeholder title screen, victory and failure screens, and a credits page. Also stuck in a “main melody” for the music, sent it off, and went to sleep.

Day 3

Woah, l3mmy does drums! The music has been massively embettered while i slept, nice :3 The final day: import the remaining art assets, add some medals for beating (round times near) the devs’ times, and a bit of optimization and bugfixing. These three-day jams are nice, because the final day is always just adding a bit of polish.

Overall

Yet another Mini Jam, yet another fun experience. I really enjoyed working with l3mmy on this, and hope it’s as fun for others to play as it was to make.

Oh and, at the time of this writing, my current record is 0:58.383