#tojam

On the first day, I started setting up a lot of the system, but left a lot of the difficult stuff for later.  I had drawn the mountain climbers and the Yeti, and gave the mountain climbers some basic controls (just up and down), but gave a little randomness to their climbing speeds so people wouldn’t be able to just hit all the keys in rhythm.  You might notice I also made the slower characters look a little heavier.

At this point in the development, I didn’t have the collision detection set up, so the game was mostly broken, but at least the primary controls and concepts were set up, but the Goal Line doesn’t work and the Yeti just crawl over you, and float up and off the screen.

You can play the Day 1 release here!

On Day 2, I started in on working on parts to really get the feeling down.  One of the main mechanics is the “tether”, which is just drawing a curve connecting the climbers together.  However, if the climbers get too far ahead or too far behind, the rope gets taut and warns the players that they need to get back in line.  However, I still didn’t add in the failure state at this point, so the line just stops being drawn if they overextend it, so the climbers can just race ahead. 

The other issue I had with the script for the curve being drawn was that it used a part of Game Maker that I had never used before - vertices - and it was regulated to a 1-pixel-thick line.  I wanted something bigger, so I went into the curve code, and actually rewrote it to serve the purpose that I wanted.  (I probably should add that code to the repository to help others...)

I got a couple of neat unintended results, though!

Third try was the charm. :)

I added a particle system to make snow flakes, but the built-in “snow” effect felt very light and fluffy - not exactly the effect I was going for on top of a mountain, so I looked into my Vials game and grabbed the Particle system from that, adjusting it enough to get stronger and more intense as the climbers got further up the mountain.

I added the Yeti collision at this point, so I started getting into working out how much of a target I wanted to make my little climbers.  The first time I set it, their hitbox was just perfect, and it gives you just enough of a feeling that you just narrowly missed being caught!

I also added Yeti that would jump in from the sides, and because you couldn’t see where they were going to jump towards, I added a trajectory path, using that same code for the tethers:

You’ll notice though, that the line keeps changing based the Yeti’s location.  That one was a simple fix: the start point stays at the Yeti’s originating point rather than following him along.  This also helped in keeping the Yeti on the actual path.  (when I slowed it down, they kinda looked like Superman flying across the screen.)

The sound was also started to be added at this point.  The BBC released a large amount of sound effects for free (with a non-commercial usage), so I used a collection of howling wind, screaming humans, and growling animals.  Just like last year’s TOJam, I worked again with Alex Maletich who provided an incredible tribal beat to the level and gave it some intense sensation.

I came across an unusual situation when it came to uploading the game onto my website -- as a precaution to prevent auto-loading ads with sound, Chrome and most modern browsers do not allow sound to be played unless you interact with the page first.  As such, simply placing the game on my webpage leaves the game silent, despite the music and sound effects being added at this point in development.

You can play the Day 2 release here!

With the third and final day, I felt a little bit of a crunch but it wasn’t too intense.  Besides, the point of a Game Jam is not to be stressed!  I started in with completing what was necessary to make a game a proper game -- the goal and failure states.  I had finished the Goal state on Day 2, so I worked on the two failure states (Tether breaking, or being caught by the Yeti).

At some point I feel like I was building “spaghetti code” as the timeline was nearing the end, but I think sometimes I’m trying too hard to optimize the code -- the most processor-intensive part of the game is the particle system, and even then, the most the CPU hits is 10% total.  But much like those little “secrets” that game programmers admit to, when the tether breaks, I spawn an invisible Yeti on top of the climbers so they all “fall”. (Also, you might notice that when the tether breaks, not everyone falls, the one who strayed from the team stays clinging to the wall.  That was my intention in keeping with the theme of “Winning is for Losers”.)

I still feel a little like a Rookie, hence the tagline of Silver Ball Cafe Games being “Oh, it was a typo, cool”.  Throughout production, I had some issues remembering which variable I needed to adjust and so in some cases the difference between an image_index and a sprite_index would result in disembodied legs or torsos chasing after you instead of Yeti:

When I look at my notes and consider what I wanted to design compared to what actually was created, I’m actually not that far off from my intended design!  The only thing I didn’t implement was that the climbers could get pulled off-course if the tether got too tight and would cause their trajectory to curve, but I felt it was outside of the scope for the three days, since it would’ve required a lot more playtesting. Maybe next year I’ll see about requesting a graphic artist so that I can have a cohesive look, as well.

The final version can be played on itch.io here!