Overview
I kept up with game jams, doing three jams in a row. This post is about the first two of those games, Sleepy Tower Defense and Nested Catapults. I’ll talk about the third game, Orcs and Doors, in a future post. These games are now available on Newgrounds and GameJolt as well as itch. Cross-posting to multiple sites gets more views and feedback, which will help me decide which of these jams I’m going to upgrade and what will need to be changed or added.
Sleepy Tower Defense
Playable in Browser Here
Weekly Game Jam 171 – “Siesta”
I mentioned in my previous post that I was going to try to stream development and I did end up streaming almost all of the development of Sleepy Tower Defense. My plan was to use the large amount of stream footage to make YouTube videos that cut down the development into more digestible parts. Unfortunately, I accidentally let the twitch past broadcast videos expire, so I no longer had that footage when I went to start working on videos.
Streaming makes it a bit harder to make the transition into doing work. There’s a bit more setup and its somewhat of a commitment to a large block of uninterrupted work. Also, narrating what I’m doing for the stream slows down the pace of my work a bit. I only streamed development for this game, not the next two games. This was due to a combination of not wanting to slow down my work and being hesitant to stream usage of systems I had never used before. I figured it would not be very compelling to watch while I look at docs off screen or figure stuff out through trial and error. That being said, I still want to stream development of future games, I will just have to reduce the scope appropriately to account for the slightly slowed pace.
Tower defense is a bit mixed as a genre. On one hand, the core game mechanic of towers automatically shooting at enemies within range is pretty simple to implement. On the other hand, a decent chunk of user interface work is required to expose tower placement and upgrades to the user. I think I succeeded in implementing almost all of the core tower defense elements and added an interesting twist with the sleep mechanic, which required towers to rest after a certain amount of shots.
Player feedback helped highlight some of the things I overlooked. Multiple players asked for a fast-forward button, which is a tower defense staple that I missed. In addition, multiple users pointed out that the “Alert” tower upgrade, which allows a tower to fire indefinitely without sleeping, undermined the game’s twist and makes it trivially easy. I didn’t really think much about adding the Alert tower, I just thought of it as one of many tower modifications that could easily be implemented without much extra work. In the future, I’ll have to think more carefully about whether or not content I’m adding actually makes the game better.
Nested Catapults
Playable in Browser Here
Weekly Game Jam 172 – “Catapult”
For this jam, I got started pretty late. The theme is announced on Friday morning and I didn’t start working until Sunday morning. I decided to make something incredibly simple with a tiny scope to ensure I could finish it in time. This tiny scope worked out really well. I had the game mechanically and content complete within a day or two and I still had time at the end to add a little bit of polish.
This game also got some really solid feedback. Players suggested mechanics that could provide more variety in the gameplay like moving platforms, wind, and mid-air obstacles. All of these would have been very easy to implement, I just didn’t think of them. Wind in particular could have been communicated very nicely through the later levels’ particle systems.
No one complained about this, but one thing I noticed coming back to the game is that the ambient sound in the early levels was a little annoying. I think this is another case where adding something to the game doesn’t necessarily make it better. I can probably put a bit more effort into finding good background music rather than just ambient wind sound. Especially with a game like this that doesn’t have a strong theme, I’m sure I could have found tons of different CC0 music loops that would have fit well.
Looking Forward
I’ve already completed and submitted another new game, Orcs and Doors. It will get its own post in the future. I plan to continue working on jams and stream more of them. This time I won’t let the past broadcast videos expire and I’ll have some material for YouTube videos. I’d also like to get some experience collaborating with others in a tiny scope environment before I move on from weekly game jams to larger projects.