Developing ALUS

ALUS was made in 48 hours for the Game Maker's Toolkit Game Jam 2020. In reality the current version represents maybe 10-12 actual hours of development and testing.

My initial idea for the game was in broad strokes similar, but the minigame inside the ship was also top down and revolved around loading fuel canisters to the ships reactor. That had two problems. Firstly, I had no good way to represent the ship tilting in the interior view. And secondly, the interior minigame was no fun and I couldn't see what I could improve to make it fun.

So 20 hours into the 48 hour game jam I went back to the drawing board.

A fellow game jam enthusiast, borb, suggested that representing the ship tilt would be easier if the interior minigame was a platformer, as the tilt could simply be shown by rotating the whole screen. With some encouragement and source material from borb I went to work writing platformer physics, something I had never done before.

With some basic physics formulas and the handy bump.lua library, I had a working prototype of the game up around midnight. The platformer version felt infinitely better even though there was no game yet in the interior part, just some platforms to jump on.

At first I thought about having the reactor fuelling be the goal in the platformer game, but I lacked graphics that looked like a reactor, and that didn't feel like a compelling motivation anyway. Then I noticed the cube shaped creature in the sprite sheet I was using, and eventually converged on the idea that the goal would be to save tourists the ship was ferrying. I named the tourist creatures "Quubs".

A couple hours was spent to make a cube spawn on the map, attach itself to the player when close enough and respawn on the map when the player got to the "escape pods" tile.

On Sunday I slept late, did some chores and played some Mechanicus before gathering enough motivation to finish the game. I added an increasing difficulty (every 5 Quubs you save an additional meteorite gets added to the space ship game), a title screen, and a short text tutorial/story section.

At this point the jam had 3 hours left, so I decided that the game was polished enough to submit. I also did not want to leave submitting the game to the last minute as the GMTK Game Jam has been known to cause itch servers to melt.

I'm pretty happy with the result. Namely, I finished a game. And it's not completely horrible. The gameplay is decent enough for a couple minutes of fun, even if the difficulty is a bit easy at the start. The game lacks a lot of things (like animations and sounds) which could have been added if I had more experience with the tools I chose to use, or was familiar with a proper game engine.

It's not the best game, but I made it.

Hopefully other jammers had fun too!

Thanks to Mark Brown for organizing the jam (and for the content on Youtube), and  to all the people who assisted or supported me in making ALUS.