## [Game Jam Time!](/blog/game-jam-time!.php)
Oh man, it's time for a game jam :)
It's a 7 day game jam by my friends on the Jam Fam Discord server, which mostly consists of people who participated in the Brackeys Game Jam 2020.1 jam.
I made a terrible game called Demise for that one.
Anyways, the theme for the jam is actually up for choice by each person, out of two options:
1. Christmas theme
2. Remix of old jam game
I chose to go with a remix of an old jam game personally, so I'm making a remake/sequel/reboot to [Viral Insurgent](https://winnitude.itch.io/viral-insurgent), a game I made in 12 hours when I was 16 years old. I figured I could blow the original one out of the water while still staying faithful to the core ideas that made the original enjoyable and garnered it a few fans who played it for hours and hours.
I also have a group project for my Games Marketplace course at my University, and there's a 10% bonus mark to it if there's a functional game demo to go with the pitch. Gonna use this (with some further development) as the game to pitch and as the demo. Total win, kills 2 birds with 1 stone.
Usually when I do a game jam I end up slowly killing myself by way of caffeine and sleep deprivation, but the plan this time is to take it more casually. I already have the hard parts worked out - the actual game concept - and a whiteboard full of the pseudocode for the implementations of a lot of the core mechanics from the original, so developing this one shouldn't be too hard. I'm also doing the art for this one myself, here are some guns I modeled in just under an hour right as the day started:
It's using the same low poly, neon based art style as the first game, but I'm trying to be less over the top and offensive to the eyes this time around. I'd also like to point out the glow-up the shotgun has had over the almost 2 years since the first game:
### 2019:
### 2020:
It may be a little unfair to compare a screenshot from Unity to a screenshot from Blender, but I don't have them in the engine yet, and with the right tweaks they'll look almost the same in Unreal as they do in Blender.
Major upgrades here.
## Gameplay Changes
I've made changes to the gameplay, although almost all is on a whiteboard right now and I'm just starting to prototype.
First,
### Movement
Movement in the original game was always a bit odd. It was a love it or hate it scenario - a friend of mine who is a Portal speedrunner REALLY LIKED it because it was pure bunnyhopping platforming to gain as much speed as possible. On the other side of things, people without much experience bhopping who were otherwise great at games could spend hours. On thetutorial level.
So, I'm scrapping the bhopping feature the original was built around, but keeping the core theme of fast, skillful movement - replacing bhop with easier to grasp mechanics which still have to be chained together.
* Grappling hook
* Wall riding
* Rail grinding
* Grapple striking
The grappling hook here doesn't work like the one in [Demise](https://winnitude.itch.io/demise). Instead, it rips the player out towards a point. They'll always pass through a defined area along their arc as well so long as they don't deliberately redirect it with their movement keys, which means I can use grappling hooks to introduce keyholes which make the player feel stylish and cool while not needing all the skill it took to feel cool in the original game. It automatically locks on to the best point, which is scored based on the dot product of the camera to the point (ie. closest to look direction on screen), alongside a few other rules which adjust its score, before the one with the best possible score is used.
Wallriding allows the player to slide across a wall. They don't latch onto it and wallrun like in, say, Titanfall, but instead, it slows down their acceleration due to gravity, and then allows them to launch off of it. The player slides down the wall. It doesn't stop their fall (unless they wall-jump to cancel their Z velocity), but it means they won't keep falling *faster*, and allows them to cross pretty large sections of wall before slipping too far if they go in at a flat angle. I'm playing around with adjusting their Z velocity on entry to maybe half of what it is before they attach to the wall.
The rail grinding system is pretty cool. Rails are set up as splines, and at each point along the rail there is a grappleable point. If the player latches onto the point, they are shot towards the rail, and the spot they pass through on their arc is just above it so that the rail detector collider on the player will catch on it and cause them to start rail grinding. It works a bit like, say, Sunset Overdrive or Sonic the Hedgehog, where it propels the player along the rail at a high speed until they dismount. Currently it's just jump to dismount, but I plan on adding left, right keys to switch between adjacent rails. Could be really interesting to do a high-speed chase level where the player is constantly swapping rails to avoid hazards and catch up to an enemy.
Finally, grapple striking. Grapple striking is basically the web-strike mechanic from Spider-Man: Web of Shadows. Grapple onto an enemy, press it again at the right time to do high damage. You might be thinking, "That's not movement!", and you my friend need to play Web of Shadows. Sure, hitting the attack button again will just damage them then pop the player on the ground to follow up with a combo, but hitting jump at the end damages them and then launches the player off of them like a springboard, to continue chaining up to other strike moves. This is the main way I want players to approach encounters with lots of stationary turrets or similar enemy types, strategically laid out to create a path players can follow by springing off of each enemy.
These are not hard to use, nor particularly hard to master, which makes it very accessible to just pick up and play, but they can be combined in ways that make the player feel like a stylish badass.
### Combat
The original game allowed the player to dual-wield any weapons in any combination. This was a cool idea, but clunky and OP in practice.
So instead, I'm bringing back the dual wielding feature for shotguns since they're the "iconic" (not really, but it's the thought that counts) weapon from VI in all the screenshots and most of the trailer. The submachine guns will get it as well. Other weapons are held single. This is for 3 reasons:
1. Balance
2. Streamlining control scheme
3. Time to create more advanced animations for both hands
The machine guns are being replaced with some interesting SMGs I'm designing which are clip-fed like some older guns (ratcheting clip moves through the weapon, rather than static magazine pushes bullets into the weapon). The Railgun and Grenade launcher are being removed, with the new Laser Bow taking the position of both - a chargeable weapon which delivers a horizontal spread of light rays for crowd control uncharged, and focuses more as it charges until it shoots a single super-powerful cannon shot with a small but powerful AOE explosion at the impact, to be used as a sniper type weapon.
A new weapon to fill a role previously not addressed is being added too, the blue pistol pictured above. It works a bit like the D-TAP from Hyperscape or the Smart Pistol from Titanfall - it automatically acquires targets in an area around the crosshair, and when firing, bullets will go towards the closest target to the aim point (until it dies, in which case it gets the next-closest, and so on). This makes the game easy to pick up and play for people of a lower skill level who might not be able to hit their shots while moving at full speed, and is fairly balanced by it's low damage and slow fire rate (and therefore long TTK), as well as disadvantage at long and very close ranges. A more experienced player will probably find it more effective to use any of the other, more skill-based weapons, while less experienced players will be able to enjoy the mechanics without worrying about having perfect tracking or flicks.
Another feature I'm considering is multistage reloads, similar to what is seen in Bullets per Minute, where each tap of the R key is connected to each action in the reload, requiring the user to hit the key multiple times. In my implementation, I want to make it so if they hit the key too early, the character's animation for the next stage fumbles - for instance, hitting the magwell on the way in then having to adjust and slap the mag after - whereas if they get the timing just right or even go a little late, they get a perfect version of that action - for example, sliding the magazine in with one quick motion. It turns reloading into a skill the player can pick up and adds a rhythm to it, without being too punishing for people who may just spam the key or don't have the timings right, adding less than a second, maybe even half, to their reload time, letting skilled players fully optimize their gameplay down to even reloading a gun.
## Story
There's not much here. The player is a trojan virus making their way through a computer system, when they're caught, and have to go loud against the antivirus. It's a silly concept that lets me be creative. I'm implementing aspects of the Christmas theme (even though I'm doing the other options) by having it so the user has themed their PC for the season; the player could potentially have to fight in a Christmas-themed desktop wallpaper, for example, after jumping out of the recycle bin icon, before having to escape into a folder. Lots of interesting ideas for what can be done with it, and now I have the skills to do it, unlike when I made the first game.
I'll be updating more about this throughout the week, so stay posted!
November 20 2020 13:46:14.