Hello !

Okay, so, seems like Grappling Scarf made it to top 20. Before everything, I wanted to say a huge thank you to everyone who played my game !

So, as a reward, I wanted to write a making-of to share my insights. Be careful, it's gonna be a weird making-of because I have absolutely no idea how to organize everything. Anyway, let's start.

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The idea

The theme was "Joined together". My first though was to find an idea to use a chain, a rope a whip or something that could be used as such. And, something at the end of it, like a sword, a ball, a gun or even a duck, because, why not ? But, I thought that was too obvious,I wanted to focus more on something that Mark said on his video : "What does it mean for the connection to break ?". In my head, breaking the connection meant the loss of an ability the played had. So the idea of having the ability to "split" the chain was born. Also, I wanted a scarf. Because scarves are cool.

At that point, all my ideas were not present yet, but I had enough materials to start the coding, I'd figure everything else on the go. This step took me about 5 minutes.

The idea of having a grappling hook came a few hours later, when the scarf was coded, it was the best option that fitted the theme in my opinion.

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The code...

... is a mess. Eh.

Making the physics of the scarf that follows the player took me an hour of my time. Making the possibility of splitting the scarf and possibility to get it back and take bombs and health bonuses took me something like 12 hours, but in the end, I think it was worth it. Twelve hours is actually a lot, since I've allowed myself to sleep, eat, shower, watch an episode of taskmaster, cat-sit a friend's cat. Take care of yourself during a gamejam !

Also. Two hours before the deadline, I wanted to test my game on a potato PC, just to see if everything is fine. Only to discover that it runned like this :

That was a horrifying sight. A real nightmare. This only happened below 60fps. At that point I still had to do the tutorial screen, correct some bugs, build the game, upload it. I really wanted to fix that atrocious bug, because I was sure that a lot of players plays on modest computers and the game was unplayable like this and it would affect my ratings negatively.

After 30 minutes of debbuging, I was not able to correct this bug.

So, to get around the problem, I had to think different and try some things. So, the scarf, at that point, was composed of 130 parts. I tried to reduce that number . So, we went of 130 tiny parts, to 36 less tiny parts, so the scarf keep the same lenght, and the bug disappeared ! Well, not really, just that my formula worked on these new part size, but not on the old size. I still don't know why.

The consequence of that, is that the new scarf is less smooth, but it worked on potato computers, so that's a win. Here's a comparison : 

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Fun fact

You might have noticed that the played can be hit by bullets. It does nothing at all. The base and the player actually share a huge part of code, this makes thing way faster for me, but because of this, the player actually have health. So, if you take 999999 hits, the player explode. I don't know what happen, maybe a crash, probably nothing at all. I won't stop you if you are curious. Good luck !

I wanted to have a negative effect when the player is hit, like stopping you for a second, but I didn't had time to do it.

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The visuals

Here's how's the main character has been made :

There's not much to say. I'm not really an artist, so I'm counting of programmer art with a lot of juice. Like screen-shake, particles and beautiful colors. Speaking of which, look at this, this is how I decided to choose some colors of my game :

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The tutorial

I've put gifs of me playing in the game's tutorial to show how to do things. I think it's crucial to explain how the games work fast to the players. Most of them are gonna play for only two minutes, so, no time to figures things. Especially for an shooter game.

Another fun fact, the gifs are actually massive sprite-sheet played like any animation in 2D games because I don't know how to play gif with the framework I'm using. So the gifs weight the same of everything else in the games, musics included. 50% of my game is just gifs. Not a problem at all, since it's only 15MB compressed, but I find it funny.

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The story

Lol, there's no story.

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The future

I listed some ideas that could be good, or bad for this game :

• Moving the base using your grappling scarf
• Bonuses that lengthen your scarf
• Different types of base to protect. Some that can move, others that are only there for a defined amount of time
• Enemies that can steal scarves
• Enemies that can only be destroyed when they are completely surrounded by the scarf
• Buildings, where you have escort something through
• Multiplayer where players can share scarves
• The potench' is infinite !

But, because making games is a hobby I do on my free time and the fact that I already have a big project going on, I'm sorry to announce that I will not work on a post-jam version of this game :'(

That doesn't mean that the ideas here will never exploited !

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Fun fact 2 : the comeback of the fun

The gamejam started on my birthday. Eh.

Thank you for reading !

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