How my first jam went, really

Home Sweet Void was supposed to be a very different game. 

I had ideas beforehand that I thought I might try to mold to the theme, but once the theme of Less is More was announced, I realized I couldn't think of a good way to incorporate that. So I took a nap and decided to see what would come to me.

I eventually came back to the platformer test I'd put together before involving a slime.

I decided, also, to stream some of the process. I had just come off teaching myself to make a game from scratch, only looking up tutorials when my knowledge had gaps in it. So I was feeling confident, and competent. Those feelings didn't last long. 

I whizzed through setting up the character, making him move, jump, double jump, and even animate. So I figured it wouldn't be too difficult to add a dash. I had trouble incorporating it and my lone viewer told me I need to use a state machine. I think I broke their resolve because they disappeared suddenly, and I'm sorry for frustrating them so.

I ended up spending the next couple days trying to figure out and wrap my head around finite state machines. And I did! And everything went smoothly for a bit.

You see, my idea was that this game would be more of a puzzle platformer than just a straight platformer. Your character in its default state would float on water, be affected by wind and fire, etc. But you could break off parts of your body, swallow up a stone to sink in water or weigh down a button. You could suck up water to put out fire. Or even eat fire to burn things!

What's more, the parts of your body that you broke off could be controlled separately.

To even my own surprise, I was able to make it so you could switch between four different versions of the player, and the camera would follow whichever slime you were controlling. Of course I ended up having to change back from a finite state machine to a simple one, so that made those two days feel like a waste. But I had decided that even if it wasn't right for this project, at least I learned something that will help me with future projects.

Spawning new players was where things fell apart. Suddenly the camera wasn't working, and part of the issue was probably because I was switching between four copies of the player. I didn't just have one player and change its position to that of one of its slime parts. No no no, that would be too smart.

I was about to give up. There were 20 hours left and while I could make something, I didn't want to compromise my vision. But I had come too far.

I stripped back most of the character's code, made it so there was only one player, and decided that I could still fit the theme. I figured the character can still shed its body to become more lightweight and thus faster. And that was basically the whole game.

As far as the level design went, I was originally creating the levels with minimal detail and then adding in the details later. When I got to the end I realized, what if it ended up with minimal detail after starting with a lot of detail? Kind of a silly little extra nod to the theme, maybe, but I like it, and I think it adds a subtle creepy aesthetic.

Playtesting the game was fun. I wanted to make it a challenge in places, but feel rewarding. I also found some exploits that I left in because 1 - I was tired; and 2 - I like finding exploits in games sometimes and I don't want to take that joy from anyone else.

I might come back to this with my original vision. I ended up realizing I could probably accomplish it by simply swapping the player's position with one of the blocks. It's everything else that would take more time and effort. If I had those two days back, maybe I could get it working, but I'm happy with what I managed to scrounge together in the end.