Making of

There isn’t a lot to say about Tower Up. I saw that the 1-bit Jam was happening, with the theme Tower, and decided to participate. I pretty quickly had an idea, and executing it wasn’t that hard. I actually started with the art first, since I already had a pretty solid vision.

After making the art, I got the game running in a good amount of time. I wasn’t sure what I wanted the lose condition to be. At first, there wasn’t any void around the platform, and I was just going to detect if the tower lost height. But that felt unfair, and extremely hard. So I ended up going with the classic health system.

The main problem with this game was the balancing (hehe, get it?). It’s a really hard game, but it was even harder in the first iteration. There used to be a triangle piece until I realized that was hell. Did I remove it? Of course not! If you reach 200m, it gets added to your bag… It’s just basically impossible to reach that mark. In the first iteration you also just had to deal with the piece you got. You couldn’t hold it (like in Tetris), nor rotate it (like in Tetris). But I ended up adding those after some feedback.

The final result looks like this:

Fun fact: The force that the pieces drop with is actually a direct result of the little scale animation it does when you place them. During that animation, it’s actually accumulating gravity, so it ends up with a lot of force. This was unintentional, but ended up being a pretty big part of the fun and strategy of the game.

Anyways, that’s it! Play it here and let me know what you think.

Making of

I was in the middle of making my 1-bit Jam game when I found out Ludum Dare was starting that weekend, and the theme was Tiny Creatures. I immediatelly fell in love with that theme, and HAD to try and make something. Scrambling for ideas, I recalled a prototype I was making a few days earlier, called Tiny Rexes. It was supposed to be some sort of pet management game, but I really liked the characters. I had a vision, a game where you have tiny dinosaurs (or rexes, as I like to call them) of different colors and have to separate them. I just didn’t know how to use that mechanic.

This prototype uses Beehave, an addon by the amazing Bitbrain that adds behavior trees to Godot. The AI I had in mind was way too simple to use behavior trees, but I already had them in there, so I just ended up using it.

I took that base and built on top of it. At the end of the day, I had the main mechanic prototyped:

You can see that you around your mouse you have a circle. When you press left click, dinosaurs of that color in the area of that circle are attracted to its middle. For secondary color rexes, they’re attracted to both primary colors that compose them. It felt easy to understand but unique, so I was liking it.

Feeling motivated, I kept goign. I had 2 ideas for a game loop:

1. A puzzle game where each level is completed when you finish sorting all dinosaurs, with obstacles and such.
2. An endless puzzle-like game inspired by Mini Metro where dinosaurs that spent too much time outside their pen would make you lose the game.

I ended up going with the second one, because it seemed much more appealing and easy to pick up, while also staying challenging.

This mechanic presented some challenges with that idea, though. When there’s a large group of rexes of one color and another one of another color in the middle, getting it out is frustratingly hard. This is due to the avoidance in their pathfinding, which I enabled so they wouldn’t all follow the same path and end up overlaping each other. This caused problems though, cause even if the other rexes weren’t following your cursor, they would still bump into the rex you were trying to attract.

I wasn’t sure how to fix this. If I disabled avoidance, they would all bunch up in the same spot. If I enabled avoidance only when following the cursor, it would cause problems when they’re just wandering around. I ended up coming up with a solution I’m pretty proud of: each color of rex is in their own avoidance layer, only avoiding rexes of their same color. This kept them from looking weird, but still allowed to nicely separate them froim a group.

The day the Jam category of Ludum Dare ended, I had this:

Complete with 3 different levels all composing a big map in the main menu, it felt pretty complete for a game jam game.

I found the music at opengameart.org. It’s made by Zane Little Music, and it’s AMAZING. As someone who struggles with music, I was trying to find some on opengameart, and it took a while. But when I found this one and the main menu one (both by Zane), I was incredibly happy. It fits the silliness of the game perfectly. One thing I made to make it feel more tense is increase the speed and pitch of the music when you’re about to lose. This also serves as a warning, in case you haven’t noticed.

It’s honestly been a while since I’ve had this smooth of an experience with a game jam, or a game, even. I’m really proud of what it turned out like, and for finally submitting to a Ludum Dare. THANK YOU Ludum Dare for having an actually good theme… It’s rare these days.

Fun fact: I didn’t come up with the name entirely…

Like jdh, I also used Percy Shelley to start with (I’m not going to act as if I knew of Shelley before, tbh).

It was really easy to setup, only taking less than an hour. I had to give it a LOT of input, though, since before it would mostly generate verbatim fragments from the texts. I was having a lot of fun with this toy, trying different inputs, such as María Elena Walsh, Borges, Homer, etc.

This one was made using Sappho's works

After this, I took a walk. There’s a point near where I live where there a bunch of trees that look like they have eyes on them, and you feel watched going past it.

It inspired me to make some pixel art based on it, and since I already had the generator, I decided to combine them. I wasn’t sure if I was going to make an actual game, with gameplay and a game loop, or just a toy. I ended up choosing the latter, since I couldn’t figure out a good idea for gameplay. The next day (today), I had this:

This one’s using a combined input of Percy Shelly, Sappho and Homer because those were the ones that gave the most interesting results. Most of the time, as the name suggests, it just generates… nonsense. But sometimes, very rarely, it creates some slightly beautiful sentences.

You can check it out here. Drop a .txt file into the window to use it as input, or just generate stuff with the default input.

The rules are simple:

• One day per prototype. Not 24 hours, just one day. This means if for some reason I had less time (and I did), I would just have to manage scope.
• No focus on art. While I allowed myself to polish a bit (because I couldn’t help myself), I couldn’t work that much on the art.
• Forget good coding practice.
• Have fun!

The second and third rules are just good prototyping tips in general, but I wanted to remind myself of them.

Prototype 1: Bomb sokoban… Sokobomb?

I’ve been wanting to make a sokoban for a while, but never got around to it. So I took this opportunity to make it the first game. It’s a pretty simple one where you have to use bombs to do puzzles. Bombs are activated when you push them, and when active, every time you move (or they’re pushed by another object), they count down and explode after 3 ticks.

I think this has some potential but I couldn’t figure out that many interesting puzzle elements and level design (mainly because I didn’t have time, but also because I wasn’t sure what to do). I got to make a pretty expandable grid system for this though, using my Criss-Cross addon.

Prototype 2: Spell crafting

This one has been on my mind for a while, too. Basically, those shapes are runes. You have 3 slots to place them in: movement, form and power. Each rune has different effects on the “spell” you cast, depending on the slot they’re placed in. So for example:

• A red rune in the movement slot makes it work like a grenade, a blue one makes it follow the mouse, and a green one the nearest enemy.
• A red rune in the power slot makes it deal more damage but with really low fire rate, while a blue one makes it deal less damage but makes it automatic.
• A blue rune in the form slot makes it shoot 3 projectiles at once, while a green one gives it the ability to pierce enemies.

I really like this prototype. It’s fun. If I were to scale it to a proper game, though, I’d have to figure out a bunch of things: How many runes are there? How do you obtain them? How do I balance them, so there’s no one right combination? How do I encourage the player to keep switching their loadout? These could be doable, just a lot more thought would have to be put into it. That last one is the most important, too.

Prototype 3: Cave exploring

Listen carefully for this one.

Now… I know what you’re thinking. Rule #2. BUT. I’ve had this art as a mockup for a while now. And also, I make the rules.

This one’s more of a “vibe” prototype.

I didn’t have much time, so there’s not a lot of gameplay, but I implemented a mechanic I’ve been thinking about for a while (a recurring theme this far): gauging how deep a hole is by throwing objects and listening to their landing sound. Near the end of the video you can hear how the hole to the right is very deep but still in listening radius, while in the one to the left you couldn’t even hear the stick hit the ground.

If I had more time, I would’ve implemented procedural generation (I already ported Spelunky’s system to Godot in another project, so it wouldn’t be too hard).

Prototype 4: Upwell

Not much to say about this one. It’s pretty fun, and a solid mechanic. Not sure how’d you expand on it, honestly.

I want to point something out: While, as you saw, most of these prototypes have a fair bit of polish, I do recommend and it’s common practice to make prototypes without game juice. This way you can test if the actual mechanic is fun, and it’s not just the extra polish that’s making it feel fun.

I’ve been testing these out without the polish aswell, it’s just that they look better on video with it.

Btw, play Poinpy.

Prototype 5: No idea what to call this one

This one took a while to get myself to make (which is kind of the problem I’m trying to solve with this challenge). After day 4 we started a Minecraft server with some friends, then I had a very busy day, then Satisfactory 1.0 came out. So…

Not sure how I feel about this prototype. It could be fun, but it’d have to have some sort of shield mechanic for it to not be hell. It’s inspired by DodgeKing (which has a very cool parry mechanic) because I was watching this video from the creator and was struggling with ideas. I liked the mechanic, so I tried to recreate it.

That’s the good part about these being prototypes. I can just… steal! Recreating mechanics from other games as practice is basically some of the first advice you’ll get when you start gamedev. Recreate Snake, recreate Breakout, etc. But even after a while of making games, it’s still useful. Just check out Mix and Jam, for example.

Of course, be transparent about it and don’t just copy a whole game and release it as your own. Still, creativity is just remixing old ideas and combining them into something new. Don’t be afraid to “steal”!

Falling back into the same trap

After prototype 5 I kind of… gave up. I procrastinated the next one, unsure on what to do, and got a bit of burnout. It was probably because I was waiting for an idea to come out of nowhere, instead of actually working on brainstorming (a skill I still have to practice more).

But hey, at least I made 5 prototypes (and the start of another one¹). And I do think I have some cool ideas here that I could make into a full game. I’m still proud of the prototypes I managed to make, even if I couldn’t make the other 5. Plus, I’m working on a secret project…

Footnotes

You can play it now on itch.io in the browser, on Windows and on Linux:

Making of

The LOWREZJAM has always intrigued me. I already make tiny games (both in size and resolution), but I’d never made a game in a size this small. How much could I cramp in such a tiny space? So this year I finally decided to participate.

The start was a bit rough. For the first few days, I couldn’t find an idea I liked AND that could be feasible to make. Workshopping ideas was also distracting me because sometimes you just gotta be a lil bit silly:

This idea could be funny for another game, though.

So after thinking I just wasn’t going to participate, I decided to give a last idea a try. The vision I had in mind was one where you would be flying around stopping fires. That’s the only idea I had, so I started with that.

This felt fun and like it had potential, so I kept working on it. I decided some enemies to distract you and pressure you could make it a bit more challenging.

While working on visual polish early on isn't usually recommended, I find it helps keep me motivated.

This felt SO fun. Fun fact: that explosion animation was supposed to be a placeholder but I liked it so much I kept it. I was feeling confident this could turn out good, I was playing it instead of working on it, but that’s a good sign, right?

When playing, I noticed the fire was kind of distracting. Like in an annoying way. And it felt easy to lose track of it. At first, I tried removing it, and that’s what I thought I would do for a bit. I even added an enemy with a laser that could kill other enemies. But the next day, when playing, the game felt empty without the fire. The fire made it feel more unique, while without it I was on track to making another generic action game.

So I re-added it, did some balancing tweaks and made the previously enclosed arena infinite. I posted a gif on my Discord server (join here) and then sirmilkman basically saved the game.

Go check out sirmilkman.

I decided to try it out, not super confident. And it changed the game entirely. Now both main mechanics, which previously felt disconnected, made a cohesive whole and a pretty fun game loop. Dodge enemies, let them kill each other, then clean up their mess. FireFighter’s main mechanic was completed, and with still a lot of time left of the jam (at the time of writing this it hasn’t even ended).

The next few days came with a lot of iteration (and I forgot to record most of it).

• I first had a water tank, then removed it because it was too limiting.
• I added health, but then noticed having 2 lose conditions (too much fire and losing all HP) was terribly annoying; so now when you get hit, you make a big explosion of fire and get stunned for a second.
• I added a splash of water you could activate when your water tank was full, then later changed it so you could get “charges” of this ability with crates falling from the sky.

The HUD was also really cluttered in this version which I didn't like.

After a few days (where I entered the zone a few times), I had the final product:

That music you hear in the bg is from opengameart.org!

I actually added a LEADERBOARD!!! and 2 more enemies after publishing it (fast small lil guys that spawn in groups and what’s basically a Creeper), but I don’t feel like recording footage of them I’ll keep them a secret so you go play the game ;)

Conclusion

I’m actually really proud of this game. I don’t know how it’ll do in the jam, but I’m still really happy to add it to my roster.

Playtesting was CRUCIAL in the making of this game. It’s not always doable to playtest in a game jam due to time restrictions, but, if you have the time, it can really elevate the quality of your game.

Sharing progress aswell. I’d always recommend that you have at least one person you can share progress to. It’s motivating and, like what happened this time, you can sometimes get ideas from others that you wouldn’t have thought of otherwise.

Finally, don’t be afraid to iterate. Your first idea is not always the best. Of course, like playtesting, it’s not always easy to do so in shorter game jams, so take it with a grain of salt.