Kiko & Mamizu (Dev Log #1)

Hi there!

If you are reading this, I assume you have played the game, if not, please do so and come right back for this dev log. (It might help give context to some of my thoughts and plans for future development.)

Anyways, let's get started!

Where It Began:

So a week before the jam started, I was looking at the themes after they dropped.

And as usual, I wanted to incorporate as many of them (if not all of them) as I have done in my past submissions (Plague Princess*, Do Re Mi Melody).

I brainstormed a ton of ideas.

However, a lot of the ideas I had were a bit too ambitious (cross country travel across the 6 different cities/ places posted in the theme/ learning 3D within a month for a badass boss fight, a multiverse  cross-over event with previous MGGJ themes, submissions & characters, etc.)

Initially, I was going to do an "Exit-8" style game, where you have to notice the differences as you make your way through the game.

However, I wanted to add a little extra "pazzazz" so I started to add some arcade elements to it (power-ups, enemy encounters, bosses, etc.)

Needless to say, this was changing the initial idea drastically and I wasn't really feeling it coming together as well as I had hoped.

So about halfway through the jam, I just decided to change the game entirely and go back to the drawing board... literally. 

For me, I'm a visual person, so drawing things or sketching them out helps me come up with ideas, to think through mechanics and imagine what the game would look like.

I sketched a bunch of ideas but finally I came up with 2 characters that I liked: Kiko (Kitsune) and Mamizu (Tanuki)

Eventually, I decided on an action-shmup style game, with the ability to switch between 2 players with unique magic attacks.

I always want to try something new in a game jam, so I made a few notes on what I wanted to try.

Development:

This was my first time doing a few new mechanics and underestimated their difficulty.

I ended up running out of time and didn't want to submit a half-baked game (even though I've done that in the past - it is time to deliver more fleshed out games!) but to appease the algorith gods, I slapped together a quick game where you just click on squares and the number goes up. :)

After the initial jam ended, I decided to scale back a lot of the ideas/ mechanics, just to make it functional and something to turn in a relatively shorter time period. (Who knew switching between the foreground and background would cause so many problems!)

But in the future, I would like to add to this mechanic (moving enemies and bosses into different backgrounds and foregrounds, team-up attacks, 2 player co-op, team attacks, more player magical abilities, more enemy variety, more bosses, etc.)

I have a few other games I want to "touch up" so once I am ready to return, I'd like to implement more of these ideas!

Looking forward to the next jam and can't wait to see what everyone else is working on!