Paragon Postmorten

Hours to develop: ~20-25 between March 13th and March 30th
Spent about 10 hours on an abandoned project prior to that.

Goals: Highest scores in comedy. Good scores in graphics and music. Middling score in story and overall. Terrible Gameplay score.

When Harold Jam 2023 began, I began with an idea. I would push my game dev limits and take a risk, go out of my comfort zone, rely on story telling, character development, tension, dialog, and not some silly battle mechanic, gimmicky puzzle, or action sequence. This would by my beautiful exit. An attempt at growth. I spent an entire week on this lofty goal. I wrote a short story outline. I built personality profiles, worked on ways to foster sympathy and connection in a short game.

Then I took a dev break to work on a house project and had an idea to just make one ultimate, limit break style action sequence based on a sexy Lucius I found online, totally in my comfort zone. I naively told myself I'd do both! When I got back to devving, it was clear I'd never find the time to do two projects. I had before me a choice between a game dev salad filled with healthy, character developing challenges, and a greasy, empty calorie filled action sequence donut. Confronted with these choices, I immediately took that salad and threw it into the trash forever and made a 5 minute action sequence game with content free dialog and a few wise-cracks.

Nonetheless, once I got cooking on this, it was hard. First of all, I needed a Lucius battler rigged in Dragonbones. I checked Robert Pinero (Low) for his availability, and it seemed doable to him. Unfortunately, I totally goofed and never told him the deadline for the project, so as the days ticked by, I finally provided him a frantic, worried update on when the jam was actually ending. He graciously rushed out a battler in like a single day, rigged up and (mostly) ready to go. Thanks to my practice with Dragonbones, I was able to make a number of new attacks and modifications to make the project work, for example there was no diagonal hadouken motion, so I had to make it. I also had to mess with the anchors for some motions to make something like the tumbling work (this was way harder than it sounds). Imagine trying to make Lucius do a flip, but instead of rotating around his center, he is rotating around some point 2 feet below him. It looks terrible.

Of course the trial and error of action sequences is very time consuming, even for someone who has made dozens. No matter how good I think I am, the common event I start with always looks totally insane. Wrong actors, wrong axis, wrong sign, wrong order - anything can make a good attack go crazy.

Developing this does remind me why I'm so ill equipped to be a real dev right now. After finishing work, house responsibilities, putting kids to bed, eating, I would have about 0 brain cell capacity to actually work. A few nights I'd just work 1-2 hours and sleep at a reasonable hour, but it took multiple late nights to really make progress - typically me taking a nap after the kids went to sleep at maybe 8-11 PM, then working for 4-5 hours before getting ready for work/school. Not sustainable or wise, but I couldn't keep up a good pace of work otherwise. Knowing myself, I think I understand that I need to either have a time cleared out 6-9 AM daily, massively free weekends, or no responsibilities after work so I can make progress from say 7 PM-10 PM. Without these solid blocks of time, I can't get into a good groove and make progress the way I want. Once I feel like any of these options are possible, I may actually try making something long term.

There are a few things I wish I got into the game. I had a whole awesome scripted attack where each kick/punch would correspond to a beat-boxing sound. So Lucius would move gracefully with the beat, damaging the enemy while beatboxing. Unfortunately, this was a bit too much to do. I also think I would have picked another name for "Balls of Lucius" attack, which was a bit too on the nose after the crotch cutin. Having summoned enemies that Lucius disposed of and attacks from the enemy that are countered were also possibilities. Maybe if I had started this project from day one it could have made it in. Some sort of gameplay was an early idea as well, with each turn being a new mechanic, like timed beatbox shields, entry based attacks, etc., but that was way out of scope and only could have been feasible if I had pre-planned and programmed months ahead of time.

All in all, I'm well pleased with this. It's not exactly what I wanted to show for myself as I transition to my sabbatical, but I am proud of the ridiculousness of it, and I think it is a good and worthy contribution to this year's Harold Jam.

Some fun game dev facts:

I drew some inspiration from Atelier Irina's ultimate attackfor Aekashics' Lumen. I always wanted to do some very long, extremely over the top attack, so this was good opportunity.

I spent a lot of time beatboxing while developing this. To my suprise, 5 year old Human Jr. approached me and asked "Can you teach me how to beatbox?" I replied "I've been waiting 5 years for you to ask me that my son." I had actually introduced him to beatboxing during his infancy, but he was a poor student, mostly drooling, or actually vocalizing the words "boo ka" (see Infinity Beatdown). I taught him the basic pattern I learned back in high school, a B-Ts-K-Ts, and he is currently practicing daily until I teach him anything more complex. 

There are a number of unused animations that I hope I can make something into one day. Namely, there was a suplex motion that didn't make it into any attack that I was pretty excited about. Maybe Low and I can collab one day on something awesome and totally over the top.  Check out my ridiculous proposal here.

I used pencil and paper to sketch out some tougher parts of action sequencing. Having the enemy kicked up the hill was a complicated series of jumps to different spots on the picture to simulate kicking up a mountain, so I had to get a decent estimate of all the coordinates ahead of time or else I'd be doing trial and error for hours. Having all the balls of Lucius emerge in a circular pattern took a little bit of planning and Pythagorean theorem to get right (I messed up the calculations once and found out the wrong side of the triangle). Who says math is useless!?

I started with a crayon because it was close, then realized that was unusable so I went with a pen.

Another thing worth noting - there are two ways to trigger the "Go on without me" line. With gab text, blitzing through the game can make it linger and show up at entirely wrong spots. I also have an extreme dislike for auto-moving text. Makes me extremely impatient, even if done well. So I made it so that if one takes their time reading Lucius' lines, Marsha would say the line and teleport away, annoyed. If a player reads really fast or rushes through not reading, Therese says the line after the boss is destroyed. That way it is guaranteed all branches have the line.

And somehow people miss this, but the "ascent" is the mountain, sloping upward that Lucius kicks the enemy up. I would never submit a game only to be disqualified by my own requirements!!!