Scholar year 2020-2021 started wierdly. The separation with my girlfried, the moving out of my place, my merchant hobby and my first student job made me put programming a bit on the side and I lost a bit of my programming abilities.
Also learning at school changed a bit from several project to realize in parralel to one big project per semester made me felt less challenged and I improved less than in previous years. Altough the first project of that scolar year was a simulation of a client requesting a small promotional game, Spectral XP-Riz-Ance was the first project that made me realize that.
The project was a submission for the Global Game Jam 2021, where the theme was Duality. Our goal was to create something inspired by the game Hue, where we can transfer ourselves between two versions, dead and alive. We would be able to use buttons to see something in one state that we wouldn’t under the other one. It was also the first time I participatd in an online GGJ, so the ambiance was different from all the previous ones.
The result was… Deceptive, at least. I was not in my best, and we wanted to be a bit above our capacities. We created something playable, with state system where we can either activate or deactivate some of the elements. We encoutered difficulties regarding ennemies scripts and haven’t implemented them as we would.
However Alex and Gerald were motivated to achieve the initial goal we wanted, coinciding with the fact they needed to realize some projects for the school, and we decided to continue the game, considering the concept was interesting and we had some base. Among all the jams I have participated, I have to confess it’s not the first time I see some group made of beginners wanting to continue a game, but it was the first time them actually doing them. Usually it happens that, especially during some specialized studies, where you learn quickly and want to move to some more ambitious projects, leaving away older technologies and jumping to more challenging projects (like I did with BioAttack !). But those guys were so ahead of in their knowledge that they actually continued the project.
So here we have the final result, more representative of the idea we wanted to have. We can swith throug ghost mode, discovering which platforms are real and which not. Additionnally, we have a stamina counter while in ghost mode, so it’s impossible to stay too long in that mode and remember the whole map. The player have then to jump from one to the another mode and move carefully across the map.
We also managed to successfully implement the diversifiers “RNG” and “Starlight”, the first one by randomly playing voices and the second one by art and environement.
It was also one of the first attempts to implement mobile game mechanics, so actually the game is somehow playable on the phone.
Screenshots
Additionnal informations
You can check either the last version (updated) on the itch.io project page or the more detailed, original version on the Global Game Jam project page . You can also check the git depot.