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
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| The phasing is fun to control! |
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| We made lots of narrative explaining the story. |
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!
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