Originally published on tumblr (7/28/17)
While I’m making slow and steady progress on LFG, my turn-based puzzle game, I figured I may as well take the plunge and take part in a game jam so I can kickstart myself into actually making a FINISHED product. Between posting updates on this tumblr and constricting myself to the jam’s deadlines, I’ll have sufficient motivation to pump something out.
I chose LOWREZJAM mostly because of its size limitation of a 64×64 canvas, which is a fantastic constraint for someone like me who tends to add on multiple features before carefully considering the consequences. This way, I’ve been able to distill the core idea and will solely build around that.
Story
After a bit of brainstorming the idea I settled on is a driving game in the vein of Crazy Taxi, where the goal is to deliver a customer his food before time runs out. This will be a good opportunity to delve into and learn physics, at least for Love2D, as I’d like to implement collision and car destruction as part of the mechanics.
Mechanics
The basic idea is that you are trying to get from Point A (start) to Point B (taco truck) and deliver the food to Point C (customer). The player will be driving at the height of rush hour traffic, where laws and common decency be damned. While there will be openings in traffic, I plan on making collisions a part of the gameplay which will add in two mechanics that the player needs to be aware of:
- Using the physics of oncoming traffic to direct them to the objective faster
- Not exploding from too much damage taken
The win condition for the player is to deliver the food to the customer in the time allotted without blowing up. The loss condition, of course, is time running out or you blowing up. Boom.
Aesthetic
Talked to Noah, my brother, and I settled on a fast paced aesthetic, possibly in the veins of Retro City Rampage. Was listening to my Future Funk/Bass playlist while I was brainstorming and I think going for a neon/pastel color palette with a Future Funk/Bass soundtrack would work out pretty effectively.
Technology
Here’s the fun (read: challenging) part. To pump out a small game fast, quick, and efficiently I’ll be sticking with Love2D, but this game introduces a whole slew of modules that I’ll be wrestling with, namely graphics and physics. I was helped out by a user on the jam’s discord channel, Aki, who mentioned that the function love.graphics.setDefaultFilter(”nearest”, “nearest”) should help me with scaling 64×64 to a higher resolution while still maintaining that small canvas. Thankfully, there is a little over two weeks for this jam to end so that should be enough time, if I really crank away at it, to learn what I need to for this game.
This has been a rather productive day for me in game design. Read a bit more of “The Art of Game Design”, cranked out some good ideas for both my DnD one-off and LFG, and even planned out the rough rough (read: rough) roadmap for The Burrito Mile (hey look a title). All in all, good work done today. Now I just need to maintain the consistency.
Kyle Learns to Write Good 