The Hero and The Hound

So yesterday a game I made was released as part of #meditationgames, which means that today, it is no longer playable!

I am planning on making the game available to patrons later in the year sometime, but the point of the meditations is short new games appearing for just one day, and something else the next day, so I’m not gonna re-release it too soon. Make sure you check the meditations launcher every day this year though, there has been some great stuff so far and each game takes 5 minutes to play tops 🙂

If you want to watch my game played, a couple of people recorded their experience and put it on youtube here and here.

UPDATE: I added some of the source for the game to my itch.io collection of unity systems, so if you want to make a game like this then you can, it’s called “Story Slideshow”

<3 THE REST OF THIS POST WILL CONTAIN SPOILERS! <3

Anyway I’m gonna talk a little bit about the game and its development partly in case anyone is interested, and partly because I love talking about this because honestly this is one of my favourite games I’ve ever made 🙂

So part of the “rules” for meditations is there is a very limited amount of time you’re supposed to spend working on the game, it’s essentially a private game jam where you decide the theme yourself.

Once I had decided what I wanted to express (the feeling I got playing FF7 when first leaving Midgar and I was all “OMFG THERE IS MORE?! I THOUGHT IT WAS ABOUT TO FINISH BUT THERE IS MORRRRRRE! <3<3<3”) I quickly realised my big problem was gonna be: there needs to be a lot of stuff in a game, and then you need to surprise someone with a lot more stuff to give that feeling. So a lot of the design is built around getting a lot done in a tiny space of time.

I ruled out high-resolution art because I know I’d spend longer on it trying to get it to look good enough. I committed to a slightly scruffy style too so I could start drawing and not lose momentum. I planned everything out in a text file and swapped out as many scenes/shots as I could for reusable ones or ones that were only marginally different (so there are a lot of hero/hound shots that are reused or reused with slightly different expressions, or flipped, or fighting a different enemy). I had to cut a whoooooole lot of stuff I had planned for after the king died (I think in the first draft, the king died like 1/4 into the game instead of halfway, and the wizard had sub-bosses to fight and that kind of thing).

Honestly, most of the planning was cutting things so that I could make it all in the time I had. The actual time working on the game itself was about 8 hours total I think, a few hours programming, getting the interface done, and drawing the reusable art (which is the least scruffy art, partly by design since it gets seen the most, and partly because I did it way before the deadline started looming :P)

Anyway, like I said; I’m really happy with how the game came out, and especially happy that it was received well by the people that played it. I’d really like to make more games like this tbh!