Seeds : Lessons Learnt
During these days the Dream Arcade Jam has been part of itch.io platform and some were able to take part on it . Lots of fun and lessons learnt from this experience .
Here comes some lessons learnt about Game design and Animation from this experience!
Idea : An arcade about love ?
Arcade games come presented normally as competitive games , but also there are some great cooperative games . For us there was this idea of using cooperation as one of the core ideas of the video game jam, so we launched into some research with classics such as Bubble Bobble or Street of Rage so we gather during the idea development for brainstorm some core idea about cooperation in arcade games :
1 ) Coordinated actions for mechanics. Some challenges must be solved by cooperation . Maybe one of the characters has to put above the other to jump , or some parts of the game activate when the characters reach the same goal.
2 ) Asymmetric puzzles. Cooperation , however, is not always symmetric. To gain specific weight into the narrative , we decided to design puzzles in which the characters might have to do different things in order to achieve a common goal.
3 ) Narrative : In the constraints presented in the jam, they wanted to have a huge component in the narrative in the game … So we choose Love as a main topic , and went through that .
Is love an asymmetric cooperative game in which the idea of progression is open and can be rewarded depending on the player’s actions ?
Game Design : From Levels to characters
In a Game Jam the time to produce a coherent prototype is limited , so you encoding the idea of progression in the video game in a very graphical way might be a good idea to transmit the idea. In this case, we were discussing about several forms : we finally decided to go for Seeds that go from the ground to the sky , having into account the different levels in a tree structure .
So the seeds starts underground, going each other in a several platforms through a tree to the sky , in order to discover the gains about their relationship, and theirselves. Understanding what was the main coordination in the levels gave us
Done beats perfect : developing in parallel
Coordination in producing the game has been a key feature for us : setting up the dimensions of the level design , starting with blank characters to advance in programming can be key for developing in parallel and advance faster .
Common assets to rule them all
At the beginning, we were drafting different assets . One of the key things here was to reduce the number of items, so using always the same assets might unify the video game into a common language setup .
Animations : choose always the same FPS
In order to simply the animations integrations into the game, choose always the same FPS into , at least, the categories that you want to deal with . For this jam we have been working with JuiceFX , with easily can give you the option of animating by layers and give certain degree of stochasticity to your assets . Beyond the nice particle system , you can actually make bouncing effects
Character Animation : the basics
You should at least solve Idle, Walk, jump and Death . Give it a try!
Test and iterate
Save some time to put altogether and test it , and at least a few hours to actually change somethings that might have work during design but not actually during playing . Testing is an important part of video game design , and even jams are time bounded experiments, testing is yet a core component of it .
Curious about the results and how this goes ?
You can play with someone HERE
