Wheeeew, another year, another GMTK jam.

Ricardium Here! Just thought it would be fun to share a bit on how we cooked up NANADIGM SHIFT. 

This jam started out really rough for us. First, with the announcement of the jam being twice the length. For me, and I imagine for many others, the format of GMTK has been really approachable specifically because it's nicely contained within a weekend. I could finish work on a Friday, load up on energy drinks, fully commit to making something during the weekend and then return to civilization on the other side of it. 
So initially we decided to stick to the original 48h period and do what we've always done. 

Then the theme got announced...

"Built to scale!"

<h3

Alright, seems cool...let's see.  What could we do which would not be obvious? Like many other teams, we also would fall into the "wait, that's just Agar.io again" fallacy. </h3

We ended up spending perhaps around 5-6 hours just trying to squeeze out an idea, with no real luck. 
Here are some of the other ideas we were considering: 

So eventually we decided to commit to an idea:
Let's make Accelerator but you're constantly scaling down smaller and smaller. 

We played around with a few variants of that idea until landing on this:
If you scale down a player but keep keep them the same size in relation to the camera, there's a perceived increase in speed. 

The player would keep moving at the same speed but over the game gradually get smaller and smaller so the challenge of dodging obstacles gets harder, speed gets speedier, yada yada. 
We got to work, but we weren't really super stoked about the idea and while the effect was cool there really wasn't enough there to make for a compelling gameplay.  Throughout the first day we trucked on, going through the motions but really getting closer to the edge of giving up than we have ever before. 

We head to sleep, feeling defeated. 

When I woke up the next day I had a little smidgeon of an idea I decided to latch on to . 

Was it a good idea? I still don't know. But we had to do SOMETHING to get this working. Since we have a big timezone difference it was still going to be a while until Bolt would wake up, so I decided to clumsily tear apart his carefully crafted code to prototype the idea.

IT WORKS! kinda...sorta. I had broken a bunch of stuff and the controls felt awful (we were using mouse controls at this point) but it was something at least. 

As I await for my dear comrade to wake up I get disillusioned again and feel like this is still hopeless and pointless.  Bolt wakes up, we eventually get back to work. 

I really want to get across how this jam, more so than any other jam we've worked on before (jeez, we've been making gamejam games for over 10 years now) , we felt HOPELESS! Our idea was half baked, we didn't particularly like it to begin with and we didn't know how to make something out of it. Bolt had a little spurt of positivity from seeing me being busy and bringing in a few new ideas, but soon enough we ran into problems. 

Our usual synergy had been thrown off. I had fallen into the mode of "I don't know if this is going to work, but we're going to have to do X, Y, Z to make this game. I got a bit too pushy with my shaky vision and probably killed the fun of collaboration along with that. 

I already was certain we would have to switch to keyboard controls but it was a tough sell. Previously the controls felt solid with the mouse, and as it was, it was going to feel awkward and floaty and indirect to control.  Eventually Bolt implemented the keyboard controls, but it wasn't really convincing yet. 

And still, inspiration was low. We had a moment where we reflected on whether we should just stop. Game jams are supposed to be fun. Stressful fun, but still fun. 

And we weren't really having fun. 

In the haze of energy drink driven sleep driven psychosis: "...what if like...ykno like, built to scale right... uhhh.. like what if... banana... um. banana for scale right.... but like,, you build a banana... so like, built to scale, banana for scale....banana build banana scale whahauauhahaiahaaaaa"
"oh and like...let's count up to 7, because that's nana in japaneeeeese" 

I don't know why... I don't know how... but this stupid 2012 era reddit garbage gave us the drive somehow to make this into a game.

build a banana, ascend to godhood, kill god probably. 

It doesn't make any sense but it's a game loop at least. 

I started modelling a banana, bolt was busy making literally everything else, doing his shader wizardry, solving all the problems, actually making the game feel good. 

Somehow the gamefeel was starting to show up as well!

behind the scenes I was cooking up some music and reactive audio stuff. Git commits flying left and right. 

Everything was taking shape. We lathered everything in post processing effects. we just had UI implementation left. 

I prettied up the UI, we discussed a few ideas for the name, eventually landed on nanadigm shift (like paradigm shift...you get it? like , because you shift the sca-)

Ok, cool name get!

Bolt's shader work and the visual design we landed on ended up working so well that the logo was literally just a screenshot of the main menu. I didn't even tweak it!

AAAAAAAND POSTED!

the game was done in 48h, we had a good sleep and Monday morning was back to regular work for me.

However a lingering feeling... Ok, we could proudly bear our 48h badge and hope people like the game as is. But like...we couuuuuld still add a few tweaks and make use of some of the extra time at least. I really couldn't because employment is a reality , but Bolt had some time. We agreed that if he was so inclined, he could add a few tweaks and features. 

Turns out, the mad mastermind had some real wild stuff up his sleeves. probably around 10h before the deadline Bolt got to work and cooked up the most insane bombastic zany intense gamemode known to man, which obviously we would call HYPER MODE!

CRAZY SHADER EFFECTS AND COLOR SHIFTING, INSANE SPEED, WILD SPINNY WONKINESS, and a really handy aiming guideline to give some hope of sanity. Bolt summoned me to have a peek, and it was clear. We're updating! in the last 3-4 hours, i hopped on to add a couple of obstacles, more UI, more sounds and somehow, a whole second soundtrack for hypermode. 

In a final rush we managed to get it in just shy of the deadline and now were finally done. 

The game is far from perfect, but in the end we managed to make something we're really proud of. The fact that we've spent good time playing our own game is a good indicator and it does seem like others have enjoyed it as well.  While this was definitely one of the toughest game jam experiences we've had, I think it really showed us that even if conditions are not ideal and an idea is lacking, it is possible to push through and make something of it. If the game gains some traction we might expand it further,  but for now we'll just enjoy the aftermath.