Project Status: Originally created in 48 hours for the 2021 GMTK Game Jam, recently updated and refactored to provide a better and smoother gameplay experience. Released on Itch.io
Game Description: Your unnammed protagonist wakes up in the rubble after a robot uprising. It's up to you to take back the city. Use the actions of your gunsuit to empower each other as you battle through waves of enemy robots
Role: Gameplay Designer, Programmer, UI Designer
Tools Used: Godot, GitHub
Project Duration: June 2021, March - May 2022
Team Size: 4
Team Responsibilities and Lessons Learned
Designed core mechanic linking the character attributes to encourage mixed and strategic use - After a certain number of jumps, the player's weapon will swap to a new weapon - After a certain number of shots, the player's next jump will be boosted - After a certain number of enemies killed, the player's next weapon will be a supercharged mixture of all other weapons for a short duration
Programmed base player controller
Prototyped UI design templates
Implemented finalized UI graphics and functionality
Refactored player states into a transferable resource available between levels
Managed team schedule and plans for future work sessions
Managing initial scope is just as important as avoiding scope creep With the opportunity presented to make any game our group wanted, many of our ideas included complicated combat systems or multiple levels and worlds. Even once we had decided on the genre and base mechanics for Advanced Gunsuit: Technowars we kept adding different guns to make it fit the amount of content we initially dreamed of it having. As we reached the end of the jam, we ended up panic-scrapping levels to meet the deadline. Had we better managed our expectations for the initial scope of the game and kept the time limit in mind, we would have been less rushed at the end and ended up with a better game to present.
Unfamiliarity with tools will increase project length In addition to the schedule mistakes born out of scope creep, this project was the first time anyone on our team had used GDScript or Godot. While the shotgun approach to learning all of the basics of the engine and language was a good starting point for all of our experience with the tool, it heavily slowed us down compared to how we were expecting to work through the project.
Old work can help you see how far you've come When returning to the project to fix and polish a few months post-jam, there were a number of bugs and poorly assembled fixes that were laughable in retrospect. With the new experience of having worked on and learned from other Godot projects, fixing and polishing Advanced Gunsuit: Technowars gave a sense of progress, having improved immensely since first developing the game.
