Shoe Gun Girl – Postmortem

Click on the picture to play/rate the game!

Hi all!

Shoe Gun Girl was my 3rd attempt at Ludum Dare and it proved quite fun and instructive, as always!

A few days before the start of the jam I wasn’t sure I would be given a very inspirational theme so ‘An Unconventional Weapon’ came as a rather pleasant surprise. I started to talk about it with my friend Aurélie and she suggested to use something from ordinary life as a weapon. “Why not a woman’s shoe?”, she said.

A bit later I went out to run in a nearby park (a very nice place in Paris by the way, it’s called Les Buttes Chaumont) and I realized it could be the perfect basis for designing the setting of a platformer. I also thought it would be cool the have some realistic movement drawn from real photographs for animating the main character (like Jordan Mechner did for the original Prince of Persia game) so I promptly asked my friend if she could come later in the day to make some pictures.

Next step was coming back to the park to take a few pictures that would serve as reference material: trees, bridges and so on.

A few elements from the park.

I also drew a few sketches on my notebook:

Tree and park gates put on my trusty notebook.

Then I found myself a quiet table in a café and started designing a level. Experience from previous jams showed it’s a good idea to try to limit oneself: I decided to have only one level. It would nevertheless include a few different sections from the park and would involve climbing to the highest spot in the park (so yes, slopes !). (more…)