Game Jam
Members Involved: Donald Neidecker-Gonzales (Myself), Alex Sallade (Music Composer)
My role: Game Design, Art, Programming, Narrative Design
In this 3 day game jam the theme was 'Buying Time.' To fit the theme I decided that the player would play as an immortal who wanted to end their life and would do so by selling it off for to their followers. For the mechanics, I wanted a game that relied heavily on numbers and balancing them, so I decided to create a clicker game, however to create more depth to it, I made it so you have to click in patterns in order for moves or 'runes' to be casted. Rather than going up exponentially, I decided players would have to go down by reducing the immortals life to 0. To make this game I used the unity platform.
On the first day, I did initial planning and brainstorming about how some of the details were going to work. I decided on creating a grid where players could put in inputs in a certain order to do different actions. Aterwards, I created a to do list of the most important tasks.
On the next day I programmed the clicking system starting by creating a list of buttons in a format similar to a keypad. To see if the player hit the correct order of buttons to activate a move, I stored each of the buttons in an array and then when a player would activate the runes, there would be an array compare to detect if the buttons were hit in the right order, and if they were, the move would be successful.
For the rest of the day I spent the time working on art taking inspriation mainly from ancient greek pottery for the style with the monochromatic color scheme of orange and black.
To make the process faster for the short time period, I decided to use compostites for the artwork. Using photoshop, I took images, matched them to the color pallete, and then combined them with other images. To give the game a bit of a retro feeling, I finished by pixelizing the images.
In the past I found a lot players would skip past how to play screens so for this games tutorial, I integrated it into the game so players would have to see it but also have the option to skip it if they had already played the game.
For the gameplay, I designed it so that when a player casts a rune, there is a cooldown for more powerful runes, so the player has to vary the patterns they make. Furthermore, by using patterns, the game does not become extremely repetitive as it does with many other clicker games.
As the player progresses in reducing the immortals life, the timer that adds life (located top right) gets faster adding further difficulty. While there is a lose condition, I wanted this to be a game that was more laid back so it is very hard to lose, and the escalation in difficulty is more there so the player has to utilize the upgrades in the shop.
