ParAnt Postmortem: my first 3-hour jam game

Yesterday evening I decided to participate in the latest Trijam (in which you try to make a game in 3 hours!). I released the game today at noon. I usually do longer game jams, such as the Ludum Dare which is at least 2 days long. So smaller jams are a good exercise for even faster prototyping.

The game itself

One of the ideas I was keeping in a safe place until now was for a very small animal (such as an ant) to be followed by a very big animal which is well-intentioned but dangerous. That would fit the theme "watch your step", even if this applies to the elephant instead of the player character.

So, in ParAnt (pun intended), you control an ant which has found a young elephant. The elephant thinks you are his mother, so he eagerly runs towards you without thinking. Don't get crushed, and try to raise him to adulthood responsibly! And it's Mothers' Day today in my country, so it fits even more.

You can only move around, but the elephant's sheer inertia can help you break obstacles and steer him into the level goals such as school/dinner/sleep. There is also tall grass in which you can hide from the elephant. But you cannot hide from your new responsibilities.

For the elephant's movement, I reused the logic of homing bullets in Ace of Rope (you can check it out here by the way!). This gives him a nice and interesting "slingshot" behavior I think, and it feels like he's very heavy.

Graphics are based on the same technique as Ace of Rope or Warhead Stroll: make placeholder 16x16 graphics with 2x2 brush with favorite palette, 3 frames max per animation, basic shading, stop there. Though this time I put all my shading into the elephant. It's a big sprite after all. The font (called Lilian) is also the same as for Warhead Stroll, without borders (because the forest is dark enough not to need it). Another shortcut I took was that the ant was entirely black with only four legs, which sped up animation a lot, very much like Old Roger's dog from my other game.

As of now, the rating period isn't started yet. I will probably do another post if this game ends up being good enough.

Time planning

With only three hours (including making the graphics and music!), I had to stay in known territory.

(Loosely) based on the Pomodoro technique, I divided my time in spans of 30 minutes. The first span was yesterday between 19:15 and 19:45 UTC+2. The rest occurred this morning, between 9:30 and 12:00. Short breaks of 3 to 5 minutes divided the morning.

By the 0:30 mark, I had a playable animated ant, a tilemap (with final graphics!), and a non-animated elephant following the ant. By the 1:00 mark, I even had a working titlescreen! That allowed for the last 30 minutes to be dedicated to difficulty tuning, and adding the non-critical-but-helpful-and-interesting tall grass mechanic. The music was made about halfway through, in 15-20 minutes. Same length for all the other sound effects combined.

Godot was a must for this kind of project for me: in 3 hours, I can either make a functioning Godot prototype, or begin downloading the Unity engine.

I would say that was a positive experience of the Pomodoro technique for me, even though I didn't really dedicate each interval to a specific task.

Conclusion

My placeholder skills are now sharp enough, but I think a longer challenge is needed. After all, finishing games is a valuable accomplishment, but that doesn't mean a lot if the game is only 5 minutes long. See you to the next game!