Craft Runner Postmortem

What went right?

Week four, game four. This was the week that I wanted to work on a gameboy style game in the style of TMNT: Fall of the Foot Clan. I didn’t want to fully rip it off, so I pulled out an idea I had a while back about a skateboard delivery guy who was caught making deliveries during an alien invasion. Initially the idea was for a platformer, but seeing as I only had a week and I learned my lesson on week one about scope, I needed to dial it back some, so it morphed into an endless runner. I hadn’t really made a proper platformer before and I knew some of the ideas I wanted to implement would be tricky. I had confidence that it could have been pulled off in a week, if I was comfortable with making platformers, but this along with the fact that it was the week of Easter and we had family coming into town helped me pair back the idea greatly.

I decided to have a player, stationary on the x axis of the screen, who could only jump to dodge three types of alien invaders. An alien that ran towards the player, an alien ship that floated towards the player and an alien ship that appeared on screen and fired a laser across the screen. In a few hours I had the prototype up and running, and it sucked. There was no balance between either easily dodging everything, or just getting destroyed with one wrong jump. The idea of the gravity boots power up from Jetpack Joyride popped into my head. It was basically a quick fall to the ground after you stopped propelling into the air on your jetpack. In my case, I decided it was just an ability you could do after a double jump. So I implemented a double jump that would give you a bit more control in the air, and then a power drop. It felt good once I completed it. The player had more options outside of the initial “jump and see what happens” model. One last thing that I added was the ability to kill the floating alien spaceship and the running alien with a sword. This was far from the original idea I had by this point, but it was playable, not unfair, and held the interest of me and my children for a few minutes at a time.

Next it was time for the art. The game had moved so far away from where I imagined it, so I guess it was only natural that the gameboy art style was out the window. My kids enjoyed the game enough that I decided to make it in a art style that they would enjoy. It just so happened that they were playing Yoshi’s Crafted World and I thought it would be a fun art style to emulate. I hand animated the player character to start, just to see how it would look and if it was even something I could do in a reasonable time. I had never done hand animation before and it worked out well for a first attempt. Next was the rest of the game. I had no stop motion setup or camera, so I used the next best thing, my cellphone. I had to take pictures and then edit them together in Gimp, which was  a little time consuming, but once I got a work flow going, the process sped up. The kids all loved it, and that’s really all that I cared about.

The only thing that was really missing was music. I figured since the kids dug the game so much, that they should put some of their creativity into it. I showed them the game and asked them what each thing would sound like. The two littlest kids took turns making noises for each part of the game or finding toys and instruments that would be a good fit for sound effects and music. They helped me with every aspect of the sound design, except for the humming along with the music. They just did not want to do it, so that sweet little kid’s voice humming along like kid lost in their own playtime was me doing my best impression of a sweet little kid humming along like a kid lost in their own playtime. To this day, this is the only game that I’ve made that all 3 of my kids have come back and asked to play once it was all done. That’s a win in my book.

What went wrong?

I think for me, choosing to not to something (a platformer) because I was worried about time management on something I had never really done before, was no different than trying to hand animate or build all the art for this game. I traded one unknown for another, and while it did work out, it was still risky. I only had three and a half days to get this done because of the Holiday weekend. I have a saying. “Just because it worked out, doesn’t mean it was the right choice.” It’s not an original saying, I know, but it is a reminder to myself that sometimes you get lucky, and that this needs to be a factor into future things when faced with a similar situation.