Embarrassingly I haven’t used this blog in 2 years and that was for my WoA2 postmortem!

Well WoA4 is over and I am super pleased with my entry. It is somehow more complete and polished than I had anticipated to achieve considering I had a full week of work and a couple of weekend commitments that would see me Macbook-bound for the majority of the weekend.

This year announced 4 themes and contestants were expected to select and incorporate 2 of these for their game: Shadows, Evolution, Ruins, Undead.

A restriction was that Shadows and Evolution had to manifest as gameplay mechanics, whilst Ruins and Undead would need to manifest as graphical theming. Since I am no artist, it takes me a long time to produce art and I have no experience producing art of any kind on a Mac, I decided to opt for the 2 gameplay themes: Shadows & Evolution.

Scope is always an issue in any project. So I took the entire Monday just to let the themes sink in and try to come up with an idea that was appropriate in scope for the free-time I had. I was open to extremely simple games like Flappy Bird but I simply could not marry that up with the requisite themes (evolution, shadows, ruins, undead) in a way that enthused me. Also under consideration was a farming game where veggies are bred and transmuted to achieve a desired phenotype with a supply & demand mechanic driving that, as well as some kind of underwater game like flOw. Both interesting ideas but were too ambitious.

The idea I went with was top-down maze-puzzler with minimalist graphical look featuring cute little blob creatures. Gameplay-wise I was partially inspired by games like Chronotron or the Clank levels from Ratchet & Clank: A Crack in Time. In these games there is a way to generate multiple versions of yourself which must collaborate together to finish the level, things like standing on buttons to open gates. While I did not include their time-travelling mechanic I do have lots of cute little blob creatures running around standing on switches to banish shadows and allow fellow blobs to progress. Blobs can replicate themselves by finding DNA/gene fragments in the level; picking these up will spawn an evolved blob friend, each blob colour has a unique skill which allows it to access parts of the map that your regular unevolved green blob is unable to reach.

The great thing about this idea is that it scales up/down depending on how productive I am: If things go well I can always develop new types of blob which enables new gameplay elements. If things go slowly then I can scale back on my ambitions for lots of different kinds of blob and focus up on just getting *something* done. My original plan included 5 types of blob:

• Green - The standard unevolved blob
• Blue - Able to swim and pass through water.
• Red - Tolerant to extreme temperatures and can walk over lava.
• Purple - Resistant to the genetic stresses of teleportation and can use teleport pads.
• Yellow - Speedy, takes long straight paths very quickly and does not stop until it hits a wall.

I probably could have implemented all of these if I had sacrificed some polish but I didn’t want to do that.  In the end I managed all but the Yellow blob, not bad at all! And I don’t feel that the game has suffered at all.

One of the hard-learned lessons from previous years was that starting from a position of no code (just an empty main() method) is tough going. I end up spending a good 2-3 days just knocking out basic infrastructure (resource management, game-states, sprite-rendering, audio, physics, etc). So this year I prepped a very light-weight game-agnostic framework based on LibGDX to handle all that. This was a massive productivity boon and this ‘engine’ wasn’t at all constraining either having received only a minimal amount of frantic hack’n’slash near the end, which I will probably refactor and generalise for the future!

Something that didn’t work out as well I had hoped was the level file format. I used a similar format to my WoA2 game which worked very well for that game. However this time around I had lots of layers to the map and keeping them in-sync was an error-prone head-ache. Some kind of level-editor would have gone a long way to ameliorating this but there wasn’t time for that kind of development. Perhaps for next time I can generalise the concept of a tile-based level editor? Or learn to use an existing one and write an importer for its file format.

Overall, as usual, it was a lot of fun. Very tiring. But a lot of fun.

I have whizzed through playing the other contestants’ games (need to go back and play some of them for longer) and I have to say that I really do not have a good sense for where my game will place amongst them once the judging is over. As usual I am blown away by what people are able to achieve in a week!

Congratulations to everybody who managed to submit an entry. I am looking forward to next year’s competition already! 😉