Hello, everyone! This will be a Post-mortem for Skeleball.
The game was made for the Minimalistic Game Jam #3. During a complete week we had to make a game with loads of graphic restrictions. The full list of restrictions was:
- All the colors throughout the whole game combined shouldn’t be more than 10, each color with its own “color code” is considered a separate color.
- Each sprite should not contain more than 3 colors.
- Each background should not contain more than 2 colors.
- Each texture should not contain more than 2 colors.
- Special effects with particles and stuff should not contain more than 1 color.
- Music and sound effects should be chiptune(old school 8 bit).
- Transparency, dithering and shadows(the shadow color counts as one of the 10 colors) are allowed to some extent but don’t overuse them.
- No pixel noise, no lighting, no anti-aliasing, no gradients(this also means no gradient-ed alpha for transparency) and no blur effect because they aren’t minimalistic.
- Sprites can overlap.
- 3d and 2d and even 2.5d is allowed.
I got to this game jam just trying to make a quick game in a short time to distent from work. I was at itch.io jams section posting to random jam’s forums that I though the topic might be interesting. As I wasn’t sure if I would be able to make the art, or even make it look descent, I searching through forums for an artist that would join.
Right in the Minimalistic Game Jam #3 forum, Galit “shoze” Weisberg showed up and said if I wanted to team up. I saw her portfolio, which is awesome and you should check it, and though something like “of course! why not?”. So, two weeks before the jam we started to organize and thinking how we were going to work on this game.
Also, to complete the team, I asked her if it was ok to add Iván Piccione, the musician of Wasting Bullets and YBit. Having worked before, and knowing what he was capable of doing when making 8 bit music, I was sure he was going to be able to make good music for Skeleball. Luckly, she though the same so that was how the team got complete.
When the game jam started, we focused on rushing the first prototype for the game, since it was kinda simple to make, so we had more time to iterate over something and try different stuff during the week. That’s how we got a working demo in the first two days, which was very similar to this video:
From there, we changed a lot of things like the movement since it didn’t feel right. We also changed a lot of values during the game jam and we added different features and feedback. It was awesome all the game design input shoze gave to the project.
Apart from everything, I guess that if I had to make a list of all the things I think that turned out well, those where:
- Focusing on a simple game, almost a “mobile” feel, gave us a lot of time to iterate and try different stuff.
- Working with new people is always something risky, but I think that we all understood very quick and pulled out a lot of content even when we had to do others work meanwhile.
- We got to have the game complete, so that is a thing already in any game jam.
And if I had to make a list of things that didn’t work out, I guess they would be:
- The game isn’t as clear as I would like. I think there is too much information from the start and that can confuse first time users.
- I would have loved to code some stuff a bit different. So I would had been able to try out even more content. But guess that in a jam is kinda impossible to prevent that. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Anyway, as always, working in a new game it is a great experience and I am thankful to my teammates for the effort and time they put on this!
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