Hey!

So, first things first - I have never written a postmortem. What makes me want to write one now? The answer, I think, is that I think a week long game jam was actually super challenging for me and I have a decent amount to say! I'm going to break them into parts to make it easier to write. 

Let's go.

When I start a jam, like pretty much everyone else, there's usually a bunch of ideas that come up. For this one, I don't remember having any other ideas. Although, the original plan for this game wasn't 100% of what I ended up with...

The original concept of the game was an online multiplayer co-op game! I've been doing multiplayer occasionally in my professional work but I've never tackled it in a solo project so the idea really stood out to me. The initial idea (which I keenly texted to my game dev friends in the hopes they'd join my cause...) was that you would each play as a character that can't leave the vicinity of each other for an extended period of time. If the 'soul link' between the two characters broke, you would start to lose power. Losing power would eventually lead to a game over.

For every jam game I've worked on so far, I dump a bunch of dumb sketches onto one sheet of paper. Just whatever is floating around in my head for the concept I'm going to tackle. You can see I started to jot down a couple of ideas for 'Powers'. 'Basic shoot' is exactly what we ended up with in the game, as your default 'weapon'. 'Area blash'... I have no idea what that is supposed to be. I guess that could be some kind of area-of-effect (AOE) move? Well, we got that in (kinda). 'Super shoot'. Super descriptive...

Along with the powers, I listed a couple of monster types. 'Bash' would knock a player out of range of the other, breaking the soul link. In the design paper you can see the horrendous sketch for this monster (the one with the funky limbs). The other, 'Pull' basically the same power. 'BREAK THE LINE!' being the ultimate goal here.

The early sketch for the skullhead is also here along with a vague idea for bonus weapons with cooldowns which did make it into the game in some capacity.

The idea of a square arena hasn't changed at all from my original design. It felt arcadey and clean to me, I never considered any other arena types. Also at this point, I realised I was going to be making a twin-stick shooter. The full extent of that realisation didn't hit me until later...

As I started to open up a fresh Unity project for the game, I began to doubt myself about the multiplayer. There would be A LOT of work to do. There'd basically have to be matchmaking otherwise any random person stumbling on my game in the shuffle of submissions would have to search themselves for a friend to play with them. On top of that, a networked game is a lot more challenging to playtest on your own.

So, I started to think of alternatives. How about making the other player an AI? Something about the idea just felt like a cop-out substitute for multiplayer. One player uses two input methods? Sounded too finicky and awkward to control. Ultimately, I settled on having one player control both characters. They're linked by a soul, so they could be both controlled by one? It kinda made sense to me.

But that idea presented some design issues of its own. If they're next to each other in the map and they move in sync, it's going to look really cumbersome. This thought process eventually landed me on the idea that would end up being the main game mechanic - You play as one character, and then something can tear the character apart, into two worlds - one in each world.

So, first things first (besides simple shooting) - work out how to separate the world.

Brackeys' tutorials were actually a big inspiration here. I remembered watching his video on shader graph, where he explained how to make a simple dissolve shader. This was an excellent starting point for the world splitting effect I was looking for. I set up two cameras, one facing the main arena (the one on the left) and a second one facing the split arena (the one on the right). When the worlds are together, the second arena is dissolved out to be invisible and therefore the second camera is rendering nothing. The main arena is cantered in the view of the first camera. When the worlds separate, the cameras move - camera one (the main one) moves right, and the second camera moves left. While this is happening the arena dissolves in. I think this ended up being a really neat effect. You can see it slower and less refined in this early video from day 2 below!

That'll do for this essay... But I'll be back next time where I'll talk about enemies, upgrades and ditched ideas. Oh, and why the twin-stick shooter idea backfired just a bit.