The Summit: Post-mortem

The Summit is a game I’ve had in my head for quite a while now. It’s an homage to an adventure I played many, many years ago that I wanted to try and recreate but add my own ideas and twists.

The first attempts to make it happen were two years ago. Back then I had far less experience than I do now, but the idea was already there: different armors, classes and ethnicities. The crux of it was the customization of your character.

When I did this, I had no idea if I had the skill to make it happen, or even if it should happen.

Fast forward two years, and this idea is still in my head. I really wanted to make it happen. I had just arrived from San Francisco after visiting GDC and I was thrilled there. The whole event gave me (and my friends) a whole new prespective into our work and what it meant. Our conclusion was the same: we needed to do more, better, and more interesting.

And when LowRezJam was announced, a few days after I came back, I knew that was my chance to take a break and evaluate just where I was at in terms of proficiency and trying to do something a little more interesting. I wanted to try new things and see if I could pull them off.

But I was still unsure if I could make it happen. The whole idea of making a light action RPG seemed like a huge undertaking (and it still is) but dammit, I was so inspired, I wanted to try! And the two weeks that the jam lasted seemed like a perfect opportunity to try! A game of the calibre I was envisioning needed a bit more time than the usual weekend jam.

The idea behind the jam was to make a game in two weeks that could fit in a 64x64 pixel window. My initial mockup was a good start, but I was unsure if the characters, with their small size, could provide any interesting changes when equiped with new items. I wanted the customization to be a key part of the experience, and changing items to lead to avatar changes to reflect that.

But this posed a huge problem. These new characters had a lot of real estate for such a small screen. I struggled a lot to keep them at this size, but I ended up doing it. My desire to provide customization options won over screen space (which I told myself could fix after the jam was over if need be).

Creating the level art was relatively simple, but in the end I didn’t manage to create enough content to build interesting levels. The bulk of the art work went to the main character. 

Before delving into the main character, I quickly mocked up and programmed the simple UI. It wasn’t anything fancy, but I ended up incorporating some neat elements into it, such as having the character’s bag in the exact same place when looting and when seeing the character sheet. In the end I wish I had more UI in the game itself, but I had no time to make it happen.

The art was by far the single most time consuming task of the whole game. With 3 armors (4 if you count the initial “naked” body), 3 weapons, and 7 animations for 4 sides, I spent a whooping 5 days or more working on the art for the main character alone.

The animations were made with the customization in mind. I had a blank character that I added layers to, each representing an armor or weapon the character was wearing. I worked with my usual workflow: creating a “naked” body and adding the details and clothes later.

After trying to make animations without reference and not being able to come up with decent results, I ended up recording myself doing them. I’d do a first pass with “noodly” appendages where necessary and then build upon them.

By far the biggest improvement you can see after I tried recreating animations from recordings was in the death animation. The first one was flat and sudden, but with my new video reference, I was able to make it far smoother and more appealing.

After that, it was time to add in clothes and weapons to the animations. This was a time consuming process, due to the sheer number of animations combined with number of possible weapons and armor.

After finally finishing the main character, I worked a bit more on art for the other crucial aspects of the game’s design loop: the campfire, a place to both warm oneself up and cook, and the wolf, an enemy that would provide an opposing force and food to keep oneself from starving.

After all that art, it was “just” a matter of coding everything. I ended up meeting a few snags along the way, but mostly I was able to advance and prototype  very quickly. For example, the initial way you interacted with the campfire was rather draconic, so I ended up rewriting it due to feedback from Tiago, my friend and musician in this endeavour.

What I ended up with was a game that far exceeded my expectations of what I could do. Tiago absolutely blew it out of the park with the music as well. It is moody and fits the whole theme of the game fantastically. I dare say it made the game 10x better than it could’ve been.

People commenting on the jam during the voting period ended up confirming my suspicions about the game’s reception, especially in terms of character size and problems that arose from that fact.

But, in the end, I am realy proud of what I was able to accomplish with two weeks of work. There are a few things I wish I had time to do (as it so often happens in jams), but overall I think I built a solid game that has a foundation to become something more.

I am so pumped in fact, I’m actually thinking of pursuing this further as soon as I have time on me to do it. The ideas are running in my head as I write this and it’s an awesome feeling.

I can’t wait for that time to come.

PS: A huge thank you to everyone who encouraged me while I was doing this. Special shout outs go to the art channel over at Zack Bell’s slack. Two of the game’s random names ended up being from there, from two awesome ladies who I would forever regret not meeting: Jen and Clarissa! Thank you so much for your continued support, and stay awesome! ❤