Today we finish our look into the projects that didn’t quite make it to the finish line. Given that some of them are pretty old and didn’t take especially long to finish, you might wonder what else I’ve been doing.
For one…life. It’s pretty intense, and this past year most of all. But I’ve also done some work patching/updating Why Am I Dead At Sea with small features and fixes, and will continue to as much as I am able. Lastly, among all the craziness I’ve started prototyping an idea that I’m really interested in. I don’t say that lightly, as the last idea I was really “interested” in turned into Why Am I Dead…and we all know how that ended up. So, hopefully, I’ll have some progress to show in the near future, and this can become a real dev blog once again!
#3: Invisible Maniac
Winter 2015 – 24 hours of development
This was another game jam submission for the Philly Game Forge, and this time we had 24 hours to complete a game from scratch! I’d done a couple of Ludum Dares in the past, but this would be my shortest jam ever, so I was pretty excited to enter it. It was 24 hours onsite, so we were able to stay overnight at the Forge and work through those magical hours where your body goes through the seven stages of grief as it slowly realizes that you aren’t going to give it any rest.
I came up with a little 2D stealth game where enemies can’t see you, and can only catch you via direct contact. But there’s a catch – you can’t see yourself either! Using only contextual audio/visual cues, you have to navigate through the game’s levels and past enemies.
As the levels become more expansive, losing track of where you are becomes more of a threat. To assist the player, there are objects that react to when the player walks over them, and sounds for when you hit a wall. There is also the ever-present sound of your foot-steps, which change based on the surface you’re walking over.
Truth be told as much fun as I had working on this game, by the time 24 hours was up, I was quite sick of the thing, and had grown bored of the concept. I even considered not submitting it. But it’s good that I did, because people seemed to really like it! In fact they liked it so much they elected it the winner of the jam and gave me a nice wooden plaque for the occasion.
Despite my misgivings at the eleventh hour, I got a huge charge out of creating this little game. You can play it in-browser or download the whole thing on my site, but note that the download will let you play at a better resolution.
#4: about-face
January 2016: ??? weeks of development
This was a little platformer that I had the idea for way, waaaaay back, over a year ago. I did a tiny amount of coding for it eons ago, which I ultimately re-purposed for the other platformer I talked about in the last post, but finally picked it back up in Jan 2016. Given the haphazard way I worked on it, I really couldn’t say how long it all took me.
It’s a minimalist retro platformer – really genre-breaking, I know. I wanted to make something small and neat, so I did just that. It’s a platformer where every time you jump, the world inverts, and previous…oh, well, a GIF will explain it faster than I can.
So, the world switches between white/black every time you jump. Platforms, spikes, and obstacles will phase in/out based on which color you’re in.
The idea was pretty simple – what is the core mechanic of platformers? Jumping. On platforms. What if I made it so that every mechanic was tied to jumping – every mechanic was tied to your decision on when and how to jump. The result was a game with very few mechanics but many interesting scenarios to design. This was probably the most fun I’ve had designing game environments by far!
I’m pretty happy with this thing, and at this point it’s basically done. The only thing it lacks is an ending (as of now you’ll just run into an incomplete level that can’t be beaten), but once I pop that in there I’d love to upload it to any channels I can. Until then, you may not be surprised to find out that you can play the current version on my website!
Well, that concludes this mini-series. At some point I’d like to redesign my website and include a section for these kinds of things – it doesn’t feel right putting them up side-by-side with something as large as Why Am I Dead At Sea. But I would like for them to have a space of their own.
peltastsoftware.blog 