SHADOW DEFLECT
Overview
Shadow Deflect is a pixel-puzzle game that was created in a team of two for Community Game Jam held on August 2019. To be able to clear the stages, the player eliminates the enemy by shooting a bullet and to be able to hit the enemy the player needs to deflect the bullet with walls and pillars in the stages. The theme for the game given by the jam was "the game is a liar". Both I and my teammate brainstorm ideas about how we want the game to be as well as come up with innovations for the game. Both of us have experienced in creating pixel designs so we agreed to make it a pixel game. There were so many choices from our list of ideas and we had a hard time choosing one that is interesting and can be developed well using our current knowledge in programming.
Ideas & sketches
When we first saw the game theme for the jam, we could not think about a particular genre immediately that can fit with the liar theme well. We brainstormed a lot of genres and ideas, had a lot of games in mind and creative ways to incorporate the lies inside. I then gave suggestion to to rank it based on how hard it is to code and how interesting will the game be, given the time constraint. After we rated them, we decided that the shooter pixel game being the most interesting and less complicated to create within the time constraint. I suggested that for our next step was to list all the things needed in the game. The most important things we needed in the game were the character and animation, background, as well as pillars. Other things such as comic style art animation and decorator objects were extras and we originally would do it if we have plenty of time left before the deadline. We sketched the character and roughly how the game would look like
Process
All of the assets and images in the game were created by both of us. I specifically created the envitonment and the objects for the game. Since we use pixel art as our primary art style for the game, we decided to go with 2D and hence the use of tilemaps. I designed the environment and objects by using the software Aseprite, while my teammate created the characters. Because the pre-determined theme is about lying, we reached an agreement to make the enemy shoots instead of the character, therefore the player is required to think for a solution to be able to kill the enemy without getting shot themselves
As can be seen in one of the images, there is a red line in the middle of the stage, this was implemented to limit the player movement so they cant overlap with the enemy. The pillars in the game are used to control the bullet deflection after it hits them, so that the bullet can hit the enemy without hitting the player, because the bullet will be shot from the enemy's gun instead of the player, as shown in the above. We think a normal death animation would be bland so we decided that whenever the player fails to kill the enemy, the death animation will occur and stop the current stage, forcing the player to restart by pressing the X/R button.
Reflection & result
Overall, we were quite satisfied with how the game turned out, given the time restriction the jam has. I would have spent more time on adding new levels and decorations because I personally think there is still much room to grow for the game. We plan to work on the game in the future, adding levels and polish other things in the game so that it can be a full game.
Even though we did not win the Community Game Jam, we managed to score third in game design and innovation categories. We were ranked 23rd overall and received positive reviews from other participants. One of the most important thing I learned from working on this project is that problems and clashing ideas are inevitable in team projects. In addition, it requires the full team members' participation to consider all possible solutions to solve them.