Global Game Jam 2022: Tale of Two Sides

The main-menu screen for Tale of Two Sides.


tl;dr: I participated with a team in Global Game Jam 2022, and we made a 2D platformer with a unique mechanic for moving through platforms then travelling along the opposite orientation.




The game

Through a terrible accident, you've split-apart the world into two sides! But you've also gained the unique ability to phase between them! Use your newfound power to undo your mess and re-unite the two sides!

The main focus for this game is the unique phasing mechanic, which lets the player travel through a platform and then emerge on the opposite side with gravity reversed.

Also, we wanted to play around with narrative elements for this jam, so there are a lot of NPCs with dialog scattered throughout the game. 

The jam

Global Game Jam is an annual 48-hour game jam.

The theme this year was "Duality".

The team

Screenshots

An animated GIF showing the player jumping and phasing through the ground.
The phasing is fun to control!

An animated GIF showing the player jumping and phasing through the ground.
We made lots of narrative explaining the story.

Some dialog in Tale of Two Sides explaining how the protagonist broke the world.

Some dialog in Tale of Two Sides explaining how the protagonist broke the world.

A dialog while talking to an NPC in Tale of Two Sides.

Reaching the end goal in Tale of Two Sides.

The game-finished screen for Tale of Two Sides.

The credits screen from Tale of Two Sides.

An animated GIF of the crystal shard that the player collects at the end of each level.

Retrospective

What went well

  • I think our combination of painterly art and pixel art worked well, and doesn't feel too inconsistent!
    • This let us efficiently create repeating tilesets and character animations, while also having beautiful dialog portraits, high-res backgrounds, and storyboard elements.
  • The phase mechanic is a lot of fun to control!
    • And it enabled some interesting and unique puzzling in our level designs.
    • And I think our visual affects around phasing turned out great too.
  • I really like all the dialog and storyline elements!
    • I didn't work on any of the narrative and dialog, so it was a lot of fun to discover it all while playing.

What could be improved

  • I spent a lot of time on pretty generic systems, which we probably could have started-out with ahead of time.
    • But, also, it's hard to add too much of the boring boilerplate ahead of time when you don't necessarily know what kind of game you're going to make.
    • Various screens (main menu, pause, credits)
    • Transitioning between the various screens and the actual game.
    • Transitioning between levels and for restarting levels.
  • Some of our higher-priority work was blocked while waiting for core player mechanics and art design.
    • But this is a pretty hard problem to avoid in a team jam!
    • And we had plenty of other stuff to work on in the meantime!
    • We couldn't start on level design until halfway through the jam.
    • We couldn't start on tile and character art until halfway through the jam.


🎉 Cheers!


This is a simple icon representing my sabbatical.

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