Override Overload postmortem

Hey, lighthex here. 

For my second game jam project, I teamed up with doodlinka to make a shmup. Well, I say we teamed up to make a shmup, but in reality I suggested it after the theme was revealed since I had some ideas for how to incorporate it into the theme.  Thankfully, unlike the last jam we worked together on, we managed to get into agreement about how the game should work mechanically and structurally surprisingly quickly. Although we did disagree a lot in the middle of development with many aspects of the game, after pestering doodlinka to play some shmups (for context, I'm an avid shmup enjoyer, doodlinka had never really engaged with the genre before), and me being really annoying about making the game the way I wanted to (I'm sorry, D:) , I think we managed to make some semblance of a well designed game.

Pretty bullet-hell patterns!

There are a lot of regrets I have in terms of missing features and being unable to pace myself. Originally, I wanted to participate more casually and take a more laid back approach to making a game jam. Our last jam was more of a panicked frenzy since it was only a three day jam, so I wanted to make the most of a bigger deadline. But then as the days went on, I sometimes found myself unable to *not* work on the game. Developing this game was a really fun experience, right up until it wasn't. I burned out towards the end of the project, and lost about a day of work on my end because of it. Things were moving pretty fast in the middle of development, so I felt I could make a solid standalone game if I worked hard enough, but alas. I think my burnout was beneficial for the game from a certain standpoint, but it was very draining mentally.

We had originally planned for two stages (technically three at one point?), two bosses, two player weapons (not including the shield), and some more enemies. Most of the assets we made are at an almost finished state, with a few days more time, we could have totally met the original plans. Alas, game jams are all about cutting out content until you have something you can ship, and ship we did. It's really frustrating, because the game would have benefited a lot from the added gameplay variety. I was really pushing for another stage at the end, but I was already pretty mentally exhausted by pushing through burnout and polishing the first stage. I'm pretty proud of what we could fit in the game though, I think the shield mechanic and heat multiplier make for some fun gameplay if you're good enough to score well.  (Even though scoring is kind of a moot point. You can milk the stage boss for points forever, oops.)

I discovered a lot about how to make a shmup by basically speedrunning the process though. Making enemies move in interesting ways and be visually appealing is super important! (I built some cool systems for enemy placement that never got used :D) Some enemies should also be way bigger in terms of sprites, size differences create way more visual interest than detailed small ones, and they give the player a big fun target to hit. Because of technical and time restrictions, most of the enemies in the game only scroll downwards. Enemies moving in different directions was a really late addition! We didn't really start thinking about enemies until it was too late. We had spent almost all of our time on making the player fun to control and shoot stuff with (although I might be more personally at fault with this one). 

Probably my favorite part of the stage, you'll overload your shield very easily if you're not careful.

I had insisted on having the player be very detailed, and I had asked doodlinka to make some ship rotation sprites. It turns out that pixel art is a pretty hard medium to depict these kinds of things in. We tried bouncing ideas and concepts off on each other, but we could never get it to look quite right. We might have spent way too much time on detailing the player, I even animated the locations of the bullet firing points on the player sprite to match the rotated versions! There is a significant portion of the total art produced for the game focusing specifically on the player, player bullet animations, player firing animations, the options, and player thruster animations are all individual assets we spent time on. The enemies only got a single sprite. (okay, to be fair, we do have an unused turret sprite that was supposed to go on some of the bigger enemies, but that got axed)

I can't overstate how much (somewhat unnecessary, most of it was unfortunately just polish) dev time went into the player, the fact that I have to write a whole second paragraph to continue describing it should be evidence enough! We also tweaked the parameters of the player a lot, we made the player bullets fire at 4 or 5 unique ways during the development of the game. There's also the lazer weapon that I added in the final days of the development, which got axed almost as soon as I finished it because it simply was not fun. I really wanted two different weapon types, and to somehow tie it in with the scoring or heat mechanics somehow. I think it would have increased the depth a lot more, and maybe even made players engage with the heat system just a bit more...

Overall, I think I learned a lot about making different parts of a game fit together. I had to think about how to make sound effects and music fitting to this specific game, and consider how to make the visual effects as appealing as possible. I'm pretty inexperienced, but this is definitely my biggest game yet. For what it is, I'm pretty damn proud of it. I plan to release a post-jam version eventually, with the coveted extra stage, and maybe something more?

Special thanks to a certain, very enthusiastic, tester. You know who you are ;).