postsubmittem

This was written as part of Bigmode Game Jam 2023. The theme was "mode." It's possible that someone might feel like this game isn't focused enough on that theme. And maybe it's not. But at the time and after struggling with the theme for a couple of days, I thought I'd really nailed "mode" with the main mechanic.

And the main mechanic is this: You have a gun which has two modes, red and blue. You can use the gun to lay down red and blue "mines." When two mines of different colors are sufficiently close to one another, an explosion occurs. There are destructible elements in the environment which block your way until they are destroyed by an explosion. Also there are filters which prevent bullets of a particular color from entering certain spaces. 

So I coded up a super rough platformy thing and started trying to design puzzles using that mechanic. I got stumped pretty quickly and had to add the take-away-your-gun zones and gun pickups. That bought me a couple more levels. But I'm still not happy with the depth. I think that it needs another couple of mechanics that can interact to allow for a real variety of puzzles.

Maybe more could be done with the existing mechanic. But testing out ideas is a little painful. Defold's editor is very barebones and just isn't a great place to quickly experiment with level ideas. I need to build out a level editor or  rebuild it in something like Godot where there is a more robust editor. That's actually my main problem with Defold: It's terrific when you know what you are building up front. But when you're experimenting and improvising, there seem to be a lot of little friction points to slow you down. (Not that I'm going to stop using it or anything. Every tooling choice is a compromise.)

Also had planned to actually draw some walk animations and work up some of the simple graphics. But in the end I decided that most of them were kitschy and mostly good enough. So several placeholder images got promoted to final "art" in short order.

I submitted this a few days before the end of the jam. There's plenty of polish I could do. But I am kind of over this idea, at least for now. It might be fun? It might even be genuinely terrible.  As is traditional after showing something to the world, I think it's probably terrible.