Game Jam Postmortem

We made it! The jam is over, and we have a small playable gamelet.

It's a game about a person stranded on a moon somewhere, and their giant construction robot. The two characters play on the same level, but on a different scale. When playing the  pilot, the robot becomes part of the level geometry. The pilot can access switches and small passages that might as well be decoration on the robot scale, while the robot can push parts of the level around.

So how big is the robot? Slightly above 10 times the pilot's size, so around 20m. That seems to be a pretty standard size for giant robots. Bigger than the (comparatively) small BattleTech robots, around the size of a Gundam, but way smaller than an EVA. Originally we wanted to make the robot even bigger – but constructing a level around it brought us back to more reasonable scales.

In the beginning, we weren't sure whether to go with this game idea at all. We wanted to find a more creative take on the theme, but fell back on the classics. I grew to like the idea more and more during development. Partially because we were struggling to make the scale work – to me that meant we were actually on theme. Turns out 2d engines and pixel graphics don't cope well with huge scenes and differences in scale!

We had to use quite a few tricks to make the scale work, for example:

• A pixelation shader to make the zoomed out view look like pixel graphics
• Baking parts of the map into bigger objects to reduce the number of entities in the scene
• Swapping out various graphics on the fly when changing scale
• Some camera trickery so it's possible to follow what's happening
• Using different collision shapes on the same objects, depending on the scale / controlled character
• Actually designing the robot as part of the map

Unfortunately, all the tech work we had to do meant we didn't have much time for creating content for the game. I really wanted the robot to pick up parts of the level, and stack them up to reach higher places as the pilot. But still, I'm happy with what we accomplished, even if it's just a single level. It was a lot of fun :)