WAYWARD post-mortem

Pre-JAM

I got to the workspace that our community was using around 5:30. Britt was heading back from Tech Fest NW for the first hour or two of the jam, but he called me as soon as the theme was announced.

“It’s the worst one!” He grumbled loudly over the phone.

“Yeah dude.”

We weren’t a huge fan of the theme, though apparently most everybody else was because it won by a landslide, not because monsters aren’t cool or whatever, but because it could only really be interpreted as a setting, not a gameplay mechanic, both, or either. Most of the best themes are ones that are both interesting in the narrative ideas they provake and the mechanics that they provide. For this jam, we were stumped because nothing instantly came to mind. I was talking to Dante, who made “V8000 AD“, and was fumbling around with the ideas of a monster truck game (get it? haw haw), a game about being a cutesy monster husband in a business suit who kisses as many other monsters as he can to break his wife’s heart, a rampage-like, etc… I wrote a list of the obvious choices (Godzilla, Cthulu, any game that pulls the rug out from under you and shouts “Surprise! You were the monster all along!“) Britt and I kept up the phone calls but couldn’t settle on anything. Until of course he got there and then we instantly figured it out, the same way that we click on most of our projects. It would be a game about the hunting of a wolf and the desire for revenge with an undertone, but non-surprising ending of the idea that humans value their own lives more than that of other creatures.

During-JAM!

Britt got to work on the art, and I on the core game play after we decided on a twin stick shooter. He started out with some fantastic pixel art that fit my idea perfectly, and I built the game around that. About three hours in, he metaphorically table-flipped and said “I don’t like this, I feel uninspired.” I asked him why, and while he couldn’t find the answer, it was probably that all he does in our projects is pixel-art. Our main project ChargeShot has a relatively SNES-y aesthetic, while our last LD entry was poppy and retro. He needed a change of pace.

I was bummed at first because I really liked the art that he had done, and I was left to kinda wander around for the next couple hours while he got me some art to work with. By the end of the first night I had two trees from him, the MC’s downward-facing sprite, and a bush. I didn’t want to call it a night because I was doped up on coffee and the free keg that the workspace provided,

So I spent the entire night polishing what little we had as much as I could. This process included nice kickback and rumble for the controller, silky camera control, and learning GLSL to build a radial blur filter.

The next day Britt spent his time making the sound effects and most of the rest of the art assets. I spent a good chunk of time working on making the environment sway. We decided to use procedural animation (i.e. animated with code) instead of traditional on everything in the game. The character has a cute wobble-hop, the trees and bushes squish and sway, and the speech bubbles pop and scale. The end of this day, I implemented the basic Beast (because they kinda became not really wolves by this point), which pursues the player and dies in a sad pool of blood.

Following this, I spent some time on making a solid UI (a big complaint about our last entry) where the user can change from gamepad to keyboard input and back at runtime and quit the game.

For music, we decided to use Messhof’s TrackDog extension for Game Maker (which was used in Nidhogg) to create dynamic music tracks that get more intense while in combat. I am also using this in ChargeShot, so I was pretty familiar with it. Britt created a nice, somewhat celtic track with tribal drums, pad synths, and pan flutes.

The majority of the rest of the time was spent goofing off and making childish jokes with the rest of the Kartridge Family.

Crunch Time!

This time around, I didn’t feel too stressed for time. The boss Beast and win condition as well as several game breaking bugs and the NPC’s were created probably in the last two hours or so of the jam, now at my apartment. I also took a break to make the music for Dante’s V8000 game, mentioned above.

A few changes we wanted to get in weren’t implemented due to a lack of time, but all-in-all, we are very happy with the way this one turned out. We’ve been making games for a living for the last few months now, and it truly feels good to know that you are good at what you do after committing so much time to the medium. The game is somewhat difficult, a little bit GPU-heavy, but overall enjoyable, at least we hope.

Give WAYWARD a try here!