The Plan

The Jam started for us on Friday evening. Our plan was to spend that night just coming up with ideas and seeing what stuck. Leaving us with Saturday and Sunday till the evening to build the game.

As fortune would have it the Jam theme really suited us and we came up with an idea we both liked pretty quickly. Due to that we started the Friday night instead.

The Idea

Our Idea was to build a puzzle game where you place the collectibles in a level design in order to guide players through levels. So you place items in a level and the player character will then try solve the level following your collectables.

Players should be able to Jump, Double jump, walk, climb ladders, pick things up, collect chests and coins. We had intended to add more abilities such as different weapons and tools. Swapping them out, wall jumping and dash.

Things we left behind

Of the ideas we had that we could not find time to add were wall jumping, dash and some ideas about tourches and burning webs. Our approach was to build levels and add features as we go. This meant we had a working prototype at all times we just added more and more levels. We had no idea how many levels we would finally end with but at least it made for a less stressful development cycle as there was no mad rush to cram too much in.

Things we added

As we were making early releases it became apparent that we needed more tools to help the players (The actual players not the game’s player) know how far jumps were and when a coin was noticed. This feedback from some early players really helped us reshape the game early.

We also added the whole feedback process via reviews. It just felt exactly how we would try improve our own games in real life so we used the same mechanic in game. This was not initially part of the design it just emerged as we went.

Things we wish we had time to do

In review there some mistakes in terms of progression and feedback. With more time we would want to improve on those issues.

Some levels are too hard

We feel that there are perhaps 2 levels that are a bit tough and we suspect people drop off on those. We should have tried to find a way to make those levels easier or replace them. The curve was just too sharp. All levels can be completed though

Retry feedback

What would really have helped would be that in each playthrough the placements from the last playthrough were indicated. So you could see where the coins were placed from your last playthrough. This would allow players to easily make small adjustments and not as often happens end up loosing progression.

Never ending story

We would also have liked to add a method to determine if the player was looping, allowing for it to end with a bad review about being stuck. Currently those situations can be overcome with the exit button but it would have been good if the game could determine when that happens.

What went right

Honestly we lucked out with the graphics. Since neither of us are artists we are really happy with how the images turned out and the really positive feedback has been welcomed. It helped we used a strong palette to guide us, we highly recommend picking a palette before you start. Additionally for the animations we used a template that we drew over and that added a lot of life to the game.

The writing went smoothly and we are really happy that people related to it and enjoyed it.

We were lucky we had no really glaring tough bugs that hit us as we went. That’s not to say there were no bugs, just non that broke the game completely.

All in all we had a great time doing the jam. A fair bit was learned for our next projects too.