While I am professionally a web developer and have a lot of programming experience, I went to art school for illustration and sculpture, and have made lots of art over the years. I've never made an actual game before, outside of some simple interactive HTML things, but I've always wanted to make something more. As a frequent connoisseur of Kyle Bosman content, I was always tempted to try joining one of the annual Robot Party Jams, and this year I decided to take the plunge.

I opted for Construct 3 after some initial quick research, since it seemed a comfortable and easy to use engine for me to dip my toe into.I knew I could handle the programming and art side, but I have no aptitude for music, an so I opted for Epidemic for a source of sounds

Below is a general development timeline and how it all came together.

📅 August 25

The game jam kickoff stream happens and the juices start flowing. Didn't do anything yet, just pondered.

📅 August 28

I wrote out a design document detailing the general flow, levels, script, and side ideas. My immediate thought was a documentary style game since this was a failed property in the early 2000s. I fiddled with this document for a couple more days and lining everything up.

📅 September 1

I started to consider the designs for my custom Skremplets. I knew I wanted smooth, wet, and furry, just for some variety. 

Harky came from merging two Skremplet concepts I tasked my two children with designing. Special shout out to Legendary Butt Rare, and Welldone Rare.

Dott is based on a Lego creation: legs with a 1x2 brick on top.

Noddle was born from wanting some sort of ghost-like creature. I threw him in an astronaut helmet because why not.

You can see some other UI elements and initial sketches here for the battle screen, attack patterns, and so on. You can also see some abandoned concepts (e.g. absorbing every 3rd projectile, arena shapes).

📅 September 5

I created a prototype version of the battle portion. For this I was inspired by Subspace/Continuum as a base, but with the added anime-esque and rule breaking powers. This had the steepest learning curve in creating a custom movement system since the built in options within Construct, 8 direction and car, just didn’t quite have the right feel I was going for. I continued to work on bugs with getting stuck in the walls throughout the whole project. It eventually got to a point where I was happy enough with it though.

The placeholder sprites were from 25 year old characters I made, Indifferent the Duck and Portable the Penguin. You can see them on my website (https://www.justinbevans.com), which is about 10 years out of date.

Here I also made an important cut: characters would only have left/right sprites. I originally wanted more of a top down view, but too much personality was lost. I should have pivoted to more of a Pippistrello or The Legend of the Mystical Ninja like movement, but I wanted to see this through and kept it, even if it looks a bit goofy.

📅 September 15

By now I had a sort of alpha version of the game. The general layout of everything was in place (title screen, level select, options), but the game was not yet playable outside of individual scenes. I'd spend a couple hours a day after work honing and building each area. Refining sprites and the overall look.

Being new to Construct I didn't utilize a lot of its features very well, so a lot of code was not easily reusable, resulting in adding additional levels and scenes extremely clunky. 

📅 September 19

Oh right, I needed documentary video clips for the transition scenes. I filmed these in one take, taking costumes from previous Halloweens and such, and knocking them out in rapid succession with single takes. The 4th video had some vocal stutter, but I pressed forward working on final assets and replacing solid color blocks with actual characters and portraits.

📅 September 23

The game was now finally in a playable form from start to finish. The next day was spent polishing, bug fixing, making script adjustments, and fiddling with a bunch. 

The Zugtug fight was an unfortunate timing cut. I had a concept for it but didn’t have the time to implement, so I made it an Indiana Jones shoots the guy kind of deal. Even so, there still felt like a lack of gameplay in this "game"; I made some quick modifications to my original prototype fight and inserted it in as a tutorial battle after the character creation. 

For this tutorial battle, I slapped in my original character, Indifferent the Duck, whom I also used as a placeholder during my original prototype. I like to use Indifferent in things as a stand-in for myself, much like Akira Toriyama's Tori-bot). I did at least draw a new portrait for him. I pilfered ancient Evandonuts lore for this, straight up lifting from a sculpture I made in college. Indifferent shot thumbtacks as his projectile weapon, and avocados were used as his extra life marker.  I used the avocado for his projectile in this game for some variety, also it seemed funner.

Below is a photo of that original Indifferent sculpture for context (it was a whole exploration of digital in an analog space kind of thing):

📅 September 24

Further fiddling throughout the day as additional thoughts came to me, I submitted the game to the jam but uploaded incremental versions throughout the day as I tweaked bugs, typos, and other minor text edits.