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An Underwhelming Pitch
My "One-Month Game" teammates were surprised and unconvinced by my pitches. Instead of strong visions, I showed greyboxes.
I explained that even in these barebones mechanics, there was already fun to follow. 1 month would be enough to explore a fun game.
In my "Shareball" pitch, frantic rescues and careful communication would form close interaction between players. That experience goal had potential and eventually persuaded my team.
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Prototyping Early Questions
Quickly, we disagreed about the player's abilities. Should the player kick and dash? or carry and throw?
Both prototypes worked well, except that carrying the ball simplified the challenge too much. We ended up with dash-kicking and stand-still throwing.
We also disagreed on our physics settings. A game with a much faster ball would be more chaotic and exciting right?
More discussion showed we weren't ready for the design revisions that required, such as much smaller rooms and boss fights. But the fast ball bouncing everywhere was definitely fun. Instead of making the ball inherently that fast, we added obstacles that made its speed go out of control.
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Late Playtesting
Working remotely, we knew a two-player game would be difficult to test.
We did our best by playing ourselves and making predictions. What would be fun? What wouldn't be?
Luckily, by the time we had our early level designs, a lot of that guesswork turned out to be right. Our second playtest was frantic, nail-biting, and hilarious.
Much of my guesswork was informed by the success of Heckspawn. So I guess I learned to trust some of my intuition.
Art
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The Ball
In Shareware Timebomb, you SHARE the BALL or EXPLODE! I took the lead on making the ball as expressive, interactive, and spectacular as possible.
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3D Rolling
Our static sprites didn't look right for the ball's movement. I knew it would be best with a rolling animation.
I achieved this in Spritestack by making a sphere and colouring the layers.
This worked well and looked pretty!
To implement rolling, I set its animation speed to its movement speed, and its rotation to its direction.
Colored Lights
To make the ball's light change colour, the ball and light had separate spreadsheets. I just overlapped and synced them together.
Then I applied colour to the light that showed who had last touched it, or if it was safe. Gradients were a perfect way to make the lights dim and flash as the bomb's time ticked down.
The ball was now perfectly communicating the main mechanic of the game!
REVEAL
Explosions and Juice
From there, I added a trail renderer and an explosion particle effect. I also added Tristan's idea for permanent craters to be left behind after exploding.
Level Design
Eric is the Level Designer Now
Sadly, our level designs were coming in too late, and I eventually chose to do them myself. Someday I could expand on my process here, but for now enjoy these out-of-context proofs that I did something!
Level 1
Level 3
Level 2
Level 4
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