MoLoGa Jam - Postmortem

Now that the MoLoGa Jam is officially over it's postmortem time! YAAAY!

Chris gets full credit for coming up with the idea of creating a metroidvainia for our month long jam project. Given the theme it felt pretty much like a no-brainer. Being in a huge semi-open space with little overt guidance is a pretty nice way to impress a feeling of being lost I think. :) On a technical side we also felt this was a good fit since we've built a moderately solid character movement system over two previous TOJam projects and Unity's 2D editing tools have matured enough that we felt that we could make a map without too many headaches.

What Went Right?

Planning!

In short; we had a strong idea of what our first few moments of gameplay would look like and how the game was supposed to feel before we left the UW Games Institute on Day 0. We planned further on our first meeting after kickoff and from there had a solid idea of everything we needed to make and a general idea of how the player was going to be guided through the game's play space. Since we knew what we were going to make from week to week we didn't run into any major dead-ends or have to throw away much effort

Art style!

Artwork was mostly handled by me [Dan] and Logan with a few 3rd party assets used to save time. We settled on a simple toon-ish hand drawn style that both me and Logan could produce without having too much stylistic inconsistency creeping in. A huge advantage of going for a simpler style is that we could produce art of an acceptable level of quality far faster than if we had gone for a more detailed style. It also meant our art ended up being semi-consistent with the asset used for backgrounds.

Polish!

Unlike our previous MoLoGa project which I count as just barely sorta-kinda jam complete. This project was a fully playable game a week or two before the deadline. This meant we could spend lots of time refining our jump physics, tweaking enemy AI, animating all of the UI, adding tutorials and a ton of other small details. I am especially happy with how the initial moments from crashing, to grabbing the gun, to meeting YEET BEEST (a.k.a. Thiccboi) turned out. I feel that the addition of a few ambient sounds took what was a rather stark, and boring, moment of silence and turned it eerie and threatening.

What Went Wrong?

TOO MUCH CONTENT!

Even up to the last five days we had intended to have four visually distinct zones. These were the Crash Site, Subterrainia, a fire area and an industrial area. Obviously the last two never made it to production but we had intended to tease them before the "DEMO COMPLETE" screen took over. Sadly, I [Dan] couldn't finish the artwork for them in time.

You know what's going to go here!

Yeah. That. An online whiteboard made you-know-what less of an issue but discussing level design plans over text message and a laggy internet based whiteboard is nowhere near as good as an in-person scrum over pencil and paper

Jank! So... Much... Jank!

Way back when we first created our character movement system we used Unity's physics engine. It was horrible. We ended up building a custom world collision detection system that uses raycasts. This has worked surprisingly well for the projects it's been used on thusfar. I've made a couple attempts at using Unity's 2D physics but, unfortunately, a good feeling platformer and realistic rigidbody simulation, do not go together well. Rigidbodies slide around, fall over and do all kinds of annoying things. Using raycasts gives us the control needed to prevent things like bouncing on surfaces, sliding off of slopes, toppling over and a bunch of other stuff.

Ok. So, what's the problem?

Slopes, for one. Unity's tile editor, out of the box, makes everything out of slopes. When moving in a certain way the ceiling detecting ray can suddenly find itself inside a wall, then outside the wall, then back inside it. This means weird jittering , zips and other issues when bonking or landing on corners. The other big source of jank is trying to get the camera to be able to give the player a good view of what's ahead for the required long jumps in some parts of the game without having it swing wildly to and fro. I'm... still kinda working on that one.

About six days before the deadline I spent two days on trying to fix character movement jank in the game. While I managed to fix some easy zips, work on dealing with corner jitter produced a ton of critical regressions. Ultimately, I threw out about a day and a half of work to get back to a stable point and resume development on more necessary stuff.

Final Thoughts

I am very happy with how the project turned out overall. It's fun to play and feels like a finished, albeit small, product. It was a metric buttload of hours to get it done but it was worth it.

Stay tuned for another devlog soon with future plans.