The Making of Poseidon Vs Aliens
Q: What's the best way to ride out a hurricane?
A: A game jam?
This past week, Sean MacBean and I found ourselves stuck in Orlando, Florida during Hurricane Matthew. We were down there for work, but the hurricane caused our client to close down their facility. Faced with mother nature's fury, what is there to do? Make a game, I guess.
Enter the #hurriGAME jam, a casual jam that we decided to put on to test how we work together on a game. We went to a local bar (before it closed for the weather!) and hashed out some ideas, then went to work.
We decided to use current events, and make a game themed around the hurricane. Originally I was interested in playing as the hurricane, racking up points by causing destruction...but we agreed that this was in bad taste. Playing as a force of nature did sound fun - but we needed a more neutral target: enter aliens.
We decided to make a scrolling-shoot-em-up where you gain power (shown as categories) by traveling over water, and lose it by going over land...but you needed to go on land in order to get ammunition to fling at the aliens. As you gain categories, you can pick up heavier and larger objects to fling. Categories are also your health, so there is a risk-reward of staying over water vs making landfall.
We went to work, and discovered something - Sean had no mouse! That's right - all of the art you see in Poseidon Vs Aliens was created using a track-pad and GIMP editing software (which Sean has never used before!). Neither Sean nor I are super good at generating music, so we asked our pal Mike Ripka to come up with a high-energy rainy/stormy song to fill in the ambiance. By the way, Mike's midi equipment was on the fritz - so the music that you hear in the game also created by hand!
Since there was, you know, a hurricane - we did not get to focus too much on the game. We probably spent about 30 man hours between the 3 of us on the project - but we are proud of the result! I hope that Sean, Mike, and I can work together on a more formal game jam in the future!
You can play Poseidon vs Aliens on Game Jolt.
Here is a gif slideshow of our progress!
Infinitely scrolling terrain, Poseidon having a rave (programmer art)!
Building up and losing categories (programmer art)
Perfect Hurricane Rotation
Picking up and flinging debris
Base gameplay complete
We're pretty proud of the result of our little game jam. Here's a small list of accomplishments:
Art Sprites
Title Screen
Category meter UI
debris: 9 rocks, a stump, and a tree
an alien bomb
a hurricane
2 interchangeable tiling land tiles
2 interchangeable tiling water tiles
An alien ship with 3 separate pieces to enable explosions
A 7-sprite explosion
An alien building with 5 separate pieces to enable explosions
Gameplay Programming Features
Infinitely scrolling background
Completely custom player controller
Gain categories over water, lose them on land
Higher categories = larger size and the ability to pick up larger debris
pick up debris, fling it at aliens to blow them up
alien and debris spawner
picked up debris orbits dynamically around player hurricane
Keep track of score
Music
Custom looping song - high energy, percussion like rain
