Rex McFury: Public Defender Postmortem

Rex McFury is a genre mashup of a River City Ransom style brawler and a courtroom drama. It is based around a simple ridiculous premise of a lawyer who wins cases by beating up everyone who disagrees with him. I'm not saying this is a better system than the one in place in the USA, but I'm also not not saying that.

The game is pretty short. It has a beginning, a couple of fights, and an ending. It can be completed in about 5 minutes or less and has the option to instantly win a fight if you want, so no excuses for not finishing it! Oh, and it is HTML5 and can be played right in the browser.

You can play it here:

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/rex-mcfury-public-defender

Theme #

I didn't mind the theme. After the 9PM theme announcement I expected it to generate a lot of ideas but it took all Friday evening and into Saturday morning to come up with anything. Once I had the idea of a macho lawyer spouting testosterone filled statements the ideas started coming. I wish they had come sooner because I lost about 8 hours of development time coming up with an idea.

Team #

@david-j-michalak and I teamed up on this one, which was a great experience. He put together some incredible sound tracks and all the sound effects, which is by far my weakest area, so we complimented each other well The whole game experience was much better because of it.

What went right ##

• Art Style - I really love the River City Ransom inspired art style. The characters are big enough to have some individuality but small enough to be easy to animate. Most animations are 4 frames, but I think they worked pretty smoothly. Overall I ended up with over 130 32x32 sprites. I don't think that would have been possible for me to do at 64x64, and I don't think it would have looked better.

• Music - The music is awesome. Dave created some tracks very early in the process which I listened to on a loop repeatedly while creating the game, so I think that it helped keep everything consistent.

- Cutscenes - I was originally going to create in-engine animated cutscenes, but that would have required writing a whole ton of code and work. So instead I went with simple text over a black background with a couple sprites on the bottom. It is minimal and I think works well. It also led to my favorite scene.

• Voice work - Dave also supplied the voice of Rex, which I absolutely love. Every time I hear "The court finds the defendant's lawyer... awesome" I laugh. I still laugh, and I've heard it a lot. There were more enemies and levels planned that we have voice recordings for that are equally as cheesy and wonderful as the ones that made it into the game, so they will get added in a post competition version.

What went… not so right ##

• AI - I'm torn. I revamped the AI system I created in a previous jam and expanded it to make the enemies. I just underestimated the amount of time it would take to create the AI. I spent a large amount of time implementing AI features (stun and knockdown specifically) that were for an enemy that never made it into the game. I overdesigned and something simpler would have been fine and saved a lot of time.

• Scope - This is my 9th jam, so I am pretty good with game scope. This time to add everything that I originally planned I would have needed an extra 6- 8 hours. I wasn't sure exactly why I was off by so much, but then I realized I forgot to account for losing a day to coming up with an idea. Whoops. At the end of the second day I made the decision to cut half the content and focus on polish and reworking the story to eliminate the other two stages.

Look for a post compo version of the game a little later with some of the cut content as well as general improvements. Thanks to everyone who played and left comments. I read them all (and try to respond to them also!)

Thanks for reading!