Saturday, October 26, 2013

Almost Forgot to Make a Dev Blog

Bacon Jam started yesterday and I'm just now realizing I never made a dev blog for it.
The jam started strangely for me. I waited with all Friday for the theme to be announced. It was all I could think about. I got my times wrong again. This time I took the time zones into account but I seem to be terrible with those kinds of calculations. Anyway, the site had a nifty count down timer so I wasn't completely lost. The theme was announced 6pm on Friday and I was just arriving home from work. The theme was "rainbows."
I grabbed my game jam design notebook and went to work. Rainbows are pretty easy to fit into games as it can be interpreted as putting lots of color in your game. That's how I feel anyway. I had this idea a while back for a robot shoot em up that relied on color interactions but it was multiplayer and on a solo jam I'm not going to try making a multiplayer game. I tried to convert it to single player but it just wouldn't work as a one player game. My second idea was for a puzzle game. It involved catching colors in buckets to complete your rainbow but in the end I didn't really like the idea. I didn't feel excited about it at all. My third idea was my final idea.
I will be making a "twin stick" shooter except it'll be in Game Maker and use the mouse and keyboard. Waves of enemies will spawn as you run around shooting them and avoiding them. Each enemy will be color coded (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet) and will only die when shot by the corresponding weapon color. Red will be killed by red weapons, orange by orange, and so forth. These different color weapons will spawn for you to pick up on the map but you will only be able to carry one weapon at a time. That means at any one time you can only kill enemies of one color until you pick up another color gun. That means you need to be constantly moving because you won't be able to kill all the enemies all the time. Certain enemies will be carrying a rainbow gem. The player will pick them up to fill up a rainbow meter and eventually use the rainbow gun (affects all enemies). I've already decided to make it in Game Maker and have already got my player running around shooting.

The final game concept is...
You must stay alive as long as you can against waves of enemies that are only weak to certain wavelengths of the visible spectrum. Charge up your rainbow gun and take them all out.

 I'll scan and upload design pages later during a break.

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