So how does one make a parliamentary game?

Ah, week-long game jams. It's been a while. In fact, the last Godot Wild Jam I did was back in January 2020 (in which I did Snail Ragnarök, a semi-rail shooter and my first in an era of small chunky games).

3 years later, among many other jam games (I'm in good spirits this year!), Uproar in Bug Parliament comes out. How did it do?

Origin

Among my unspeakable chaos of dozens of game ideas, I had a game idea about entering a parliament and defending something (because courtrooms are overrated). You had to both speak with good flow, and pick the right arguments. A sort of rap battle between members of parliaments. In the original idea, there were no insects of any kind, but other game ideas had the famous Ant/Grasshopper duality. Which is one of the safest and most interesting ideological debates I could play with, I think. Thanks, Aesop and La Fontaine!

When this jam started with the theme "Assembly Required", I actually started on a Kerbal Space Program-inspired game because I was in the process of playing with a 2D planet platformer prototype. But the subverter in me had a second look at the theme… and found out that an Assembly is also the lower chamber of some parliaments.

Gameplays (yes plural)

This time, I implemented 3 modes of gameplay in one game, for once:

- Point and click as you need to enter the assembly
- Dialogues as you hear the parliamentary session and refute arguments
- "Rhythm" phases which are an abstraction of speaking with flow (I know, not the perfect execution of a rap battle game is it?)

A fourth mechanic was planned but didn't make it in time: a good old bullet-hell boss fight at the very end.

That, with giving personality to every single MP, was one of the most time consuming tasks of the past week.

Very smol game

It might be a bit noticeable that the music sounds like you've opened a good old 8-to-16 bit console emulator. That is actually the first time I use the Godot MIDI Player addon in production!

As a result, game data fits in less than 400 kilobytes uncompressed. Due to the .wasm engine file, the game is still a hefty 4.4 MB zipped. If I recompiled the engine (to remove 3D support and other unused stuff), I could probably bring that below 2.5 MB. Even smaller than Game Maker games!¹

Musics are done with Beepbox, the first music software with decent MIDI export I could find. I just had to export in a trial-and-error style because it doesn't use my custom soundfont at all (which mostly comes from Pilotwings on the SNES, by the way).

Other size tricks include: converting fonts to the .woff format, atlas textures everywhere, sprites animated only by position, and an emphasis on avoiding repetition when cleaning code.

¹ - I exported a game with GameMaker 5.3a (released in 2003!) once. The whole base game, engine data included, is less than 600 KB, but the engine missed quite a lot of wanted features at the time, notably nearest interpolation for upscaled windows, cool rendering things, and flipping a damn sprite.

Conclusion

Parliamentary, my dear Watson.

I have absolutely no idea what to do with this game now. See you on the next one!