INTRODUCTION

Hi there, I'm Luna, also known as RunicPixels. I'm a technical pixel artist, and during the Ludum Dare 53 weekend I worked with Kazzymodus, Flashkirby and Eris on a little game called Hexpress, which is an action packed wand delivery game.

In this post I'm gonna share a little bit about how things went for us and where we think things might be going with our little game.

DAY 0 - Preparation

From my previous jam experience I learned that nailing down a style / rough idea, or at least a set of them can be helpful to quick-start a jam entry, as time is limited. Our team made a little document to write down ideas based on some of the proposed themes. My goal for game jams is always to try a new technological challenge. For this jam, it was one that was simple in appearance, but a little bit more tricky under the hood, namely. Constraining ourselves to a 4 colour palette. 

TECH ART BREADOWN

The first things I did, was port over a palette shader written for Godot. Huge thanks to this, it saved us tremendously. https://godotshaders.com/shader/palette-shader-lospec-compatible/

I recently learned about how render passes work inside of Unity, so I decided to use the shader as a custom render pass inside the Unity Engine.

https://goonlinetools.com/snapshot/code/#30x1kzsmp78b9vt6nmeke - Shader code here.

DAY 1 - Let's deliver a game!

PALETTE DEFINITION

So, aside from finishing our technological setup, I created the palette we were going to use this jam! I was originally torn between two other palettes, namely minty fresh and dustbyte. But to have bit more control, I decided to make my own, and focus on having a good contrast, high saturation and a nice balance between the yellowish greens and more chocolate colored browns. Adding a bit of saturation to darker shades too can help a lot with invoking an enchanting feeling.

DOWNLOAD OUR PALETTE HERE
https://lospec.com/palette-list/hexpress4 

GAME DESIGN

Game design wise, we wanted to make a procedural roguelike style game. We originally had a lot of ambition for things like passive items and even procedural map generation. Which unfortunately never made it into the final product. (Which we, retrospectively think is a good thing, more on that later.) Luckily, by writing down a lot of our potential ideas on Friday we were able to get started on a concept relatively quickly.

I think the only thing we really ran into issues with is the name of the game and the structure of the game? Basic things like how many wands / weapons can a player carry, how do weapons carry over, are there passive upgrades, when does the map reset, etc.

Early concept ideas of the game had left the player without any weapons to defend themselves with, so I think one of our biggest design revelations was simply to have each tower function as both a delivery and a pickup point at once.

We also had some very good ideas on how to balance the passive item system, but due to time constraints that unfortunately never made it in! (maybe in a future update!)

DAY 2 - Production

This was a simple, asset creation day, water used to look way different in our game, before we settled on this almost, starry looking water

Old:

New:

With a 4 colour palette it's always tricky to decide what elements are gonna use what colour, even though I used the lightest shade for sand too, it is a shade we mainly reserve for projectiles, so I try to use that shade sparringly.

DAY 3 - Map & Wand Design

MAP DESIGN

Early on on this day we decided that having Procedurally Generated Maps, that lived up to our aesthetic ambitions was beyond the scope of our project, so we settled for creating a manual map instead.

For me a lot of this day was spent, trying to design the map of our game! I started out making a very, very rough sketch of how I wanted things to look.

While building the map, I made sure to have very distinct areas. So even if the map was static, it wouldn't get boring, and players would continue to find new places that each felt a bit different from the other areas.

The main things I did to do this were.

- Civilized vs Wildlands between the left and right areas I tried to create a contrast between a more civilized castle, town area, but more woods and wilds in the middle, we even had a goblin camp planned, but that was beyond our scope.

- Mountains vs Sea / Rivers / Canals

- Dense forests vs Open fields

- Different Path Styles

- Distinct, varied and interesting looking landmarks and tower locations.

WAND DESIGN

This was probably the part which we all liked the most, we made a spreadsheet to define a set of wands, we all wanted them to feel different. Players could have a favorite wand, but each wand had their own delivery location, so a huge part of our design was the following.

"Do I choose my favourite wand, or do I choose one I find tricky to use, but has a closer delivery target."

But of course, our ambition is still to have each wand feel like a blast to play with, just a little bit different for each. Some wands have large areas of effect, but long cooldown, others have a quick attack speed but leave the player open to be attacked.

Overall, I think we all liked what we came up with, but we're all itching to create some new wands

But overall, this was an enjoyable jam for us, and I think all of us really liked working in the constraints of a palette restricted arcade game.

WHAT WENT WELL

First of all, a tip that I'd give to everyone that jams is. Keep a healthy schedule, sleep on time, eat fresh and healthy food. It's just the thing that keeps you from being a zombie during day 2 or 3. We always try to go into jams with a relaxed and healthy mindset like that, and the jams have only been better due to it.

Aside from some minor disagreements about the structure of the game, we all agreed on a lot of aspects of the game design. Luckily, all of us were mutual friends that met due to a mutual game. (A small indie game called Terraria.) There's always a nice balance between different views and cohesive views.

So yeah, we all had a lot of fun making this!

WHAT COULD'VE GONE BETTER

Some planning could've been better, we spent a lot of time preparing features like procedural generation, which was way beyond the scope of a game jam. We'd still love to try Procedural generation in a jam one day, but it's always important to decide to do that when you really feel like it can add something to a concept instead of taking away things from it.

Some early prototyping of our Procedural Generation that never made it in. Maybe one day.

Other things that went a bit poor was time management, we had core features like the wand system and audio implementation finished only near the end of the last day, this gave a lot of stress in trying to have a working build before the deadline. (Which we managed to fix only 15 minutes before the closure of submission hour!) I think this is a common struggle, but my ambition is always to have a working build as soon as possible. Hopefully next jam we can have a game that has a complete bare bones functionality by day 1-2. Although, it's an improving line as we seem to have good, working builds earlier and earlier.

(Yes, our palette shader can actually change the entire palette of the game!)

WHAT'S NEXT

So yes, what's next for our game!

We do have at least one more content update planned! I've been working on creating some new wands and a day/night system to actually show how powerful the shaders in our game actually are!