Babbling Postmortem

(Warning. This is just me rambling. Congratulations, you're my imaginary friend.)

This was written for the "GBJam 11" game jam. The gist is that you have to write a game using a 160x144 display and a four color palette. I don't have any particular attachment to or nostalgia for the original Game Boy. I really chose this jam based on the dates and its popularity. And the four color limitation seemed random enough to shake things up and get me to do things differently. (Once I started getting into the meat and potatoes of the it, I realized that the 160x144 four color display is a whole lot like the grayscale 160x160 display on the early Palm devices. I lived and breathed PalmOS software for a few years back in the day.)

After signing up for the jam, I was hoping that the theme reveal would spur me to come up with some really wacky idea. So I was a little disappointed when the theme of "space" was revealed, as space is always on the table when I think about games. (Specifically, Asteroids is always lingering there in my brain, trying it's best to get re-re-re-implemented.) But I started playing around with the tether idea without expectations and before long had implemented a little dude walking around extruding a string behind him. The puzzle aspect came about after watching how it tightened against corners and obstacles.

The tether looks kind of impressive (to me). But it's really pretty simple. It's just a bunch of physics bodies (KinematicBody2Ds, in Godot parlance) dropped as the player moves around. Tightening it just walks through the list and tries to move each body closer to the midpoint of its two neighbors. It quits walking down the list after a certain amount of total movement, so tightening happens at the player's end first. It's not accurate physics at all. But the math is lightweight (and linear time) and looks convincing enough. The tether is drawn as lines connecting the bodies. But from a physics engine perspective, there are gaps. If the bollards (the round obstacles) were a little bit thinner, they'd slip right between the bodies that make up the tether. (Oh, and a tether body can be deleted if it is so close to another body as to be redundant. But that was just an obvious optimization. Probably not important in practice, since the individual tether bodies don't collide with each other.)

The tank robots are just controlled by animation loops. I expected to need to make more and smarter enemies. But the dumb robots have a certain charm.

Level design is hard. I struggled to not repeat the same exact ideas. And I'm not sure I succeeded there. Without a new mechanic or hazard or gimmick, I might have exhausted the puzzle possibilities. But what if I just haven't had The Idea yet?

The music came together quickly one morning. I thought a simple twelve bar blues would fit with the everyman-in-space idea. But it came out way peppier than I had imagined and I planned on replacing it if I had time. But then I added the spiraling spacesuit character to the title screen, and the music suddenly seemed perfectly appropriate.

Ramble ramble. Glad I did this jam. Not a game I would have built otherwise. And I don't expect to take it any further post-jam. But glad I did it.

Oh, and biggest victory of all: My not-a-gamer wife tried it and couldn't quit until she'd beat all the levels, even though she found it a little maddening. (I haven't had the heart to tell her that I added a couple more levels since then.)