The first set of Escada Games games. In all of them I had Sklaiser helping with the graphics, ideas, sounds, testing, and feedback: so, I would say in that in these games I did the coding, music and some art, and he did the rest.
Begins: Jan 20, 2018, at the My First Game Jam: Winter 2018
Ends: Mar 12, 2018, at the 7DRL Game Jam
Highlights: Hm, hard to say. I think Dental Defense was the best game from this season. It had a relatively small scope, ended up with various upgrades, and reasonably polished.
BoS ends our First Season, or alternatively, the Ladder 1. Looking back at it, today, I believe it is my least favorite game. Its main mechanic is being a roguelike with planes, and damn, that's a interesting idea...but it needs to be done well, and in our case, it wasn't.
Of course, it was great, definitely great for learning: for instance, I learned to use Tweens in it, and Tweens are just so powerful... but still, BoS is a gigantic mistake in every other way, I guess...
Our scope was out of this world for it. It was meant for the 7DRL challenge, and after doing it, we were absolutely burnt out. Morning Suks in particular was very, very tired, not only with gamedev but with his job as well.
After we ended BoS, he joined another gamedev team. Me, on the other side, tried to go on alone, and so begins the Ladder 2, with Escada Games not so "Escada" anymore...
In Almastone, surprisingly we had a gigantic scope. "Let's make a Zelda dungeon!"
In theory it doesn't seem like a lot of work, but in the end, it was very heavy on us. We even had to reuse assets from Archer Hunter.
Almastone's mechanic was very cool, however. After getting the dungeon's item, you could use it to separate body and soul. It worked not only for Rag, the main character, but to every enemy as well. The music also changed!
In the end, Almastone had quite a lot of experimentation in it, and in the end far more time went on trying to do cool stuff than making the game! But once again, a great learning experience, overall.
Zeitmeister... is complicated. Once again we had a scope just too big, and somehow the game is very, very laggy and resource hungry. I guess it is because of the Path Finding...
Its main mechanic is a sick slow motion effect. Yeah, that's it.
Still, it was a good learning experience overall. Zeitmeister might not be our most charismatic game, but we certainly grew from it.
Even with all the mistakes and rough edges, however, having mechanic prehistoric man attack the Lord of Time is a pretty fun concept!
Dental Defense is our second game, and it is a remake of Atari's Plaque Attack (yeah, "Dental Defense" is a direct reference to the original's name).
It is very glitchy as well, but since it was a remake, our scope was kinda limited from the start. It ended up being quite okay! Lots of glitches and Spaghetti code, and the music... hm, it is okay I guess, but still, at least we finished a game, as opposite to Archer Hunter. It has Touhou references as well, which is a great plus, of course.
Also, we thought of a interesting mechanic (IMO) for Dental Defens: every upgrade came with a downgrade as well. We should revisit it someday...
Archer Hunter is our first released game. With it, we finally started our journey on Game Development!
It ended up being preeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeetty buggy, and not very impressive. I mean, Morning Suks' spritework and animations ended up being quite good IMO, but gameplay and code wise this game was very, very bad.
Our mistake here was one we ended up repeating lots and lots of times, and we still do it: that is, we had a bad scope. It was just too big and absurd. We wanted to make a Megaman X style game with roguelike elements... in two weeks! With no prior experience! A madman project, absolutely.
Its "main" mechanic is dodging: while doing it, the character is invulnerable. And that's about it I guess!
Still, we got a lot of experience, and Archer Hunter is a pretty important game to both of us. It might not be polished or good, but it started everything, in a way :)
