Not Quite Alone
Not Quite Alone is a rogue-like dungeon crawler through a haunted house. The main character "Quixy" must fight through rooms filled with different kinds of ghosts. With the help of 6 unique upgrades, Quixy will be challenged by 2 unique boss fights where a ghost posses various objects.
The entire game was made from scratch in a week and was submitted to the Brackey's Game Jam 2022.2. You can try out the game for yourself by visiting the itch.io page here!
Early Design choices
The biggest decision we've had to make in the early goings of this project was what kind of game to make. Coming up with unique and interesting game ideas is not my strong suit. After narrowing it down to a couple ideas, we decided on the rogue-like solely because it was the kind of game we wanted to make. There's a lot of design and development challenges that come with a rogue-like that I've never had to deal with before. Game jam's are all about pushing yourself and learning new things, and the rouge-like genre was guaranteed to present unique challenges!
Boss Fights
The two boss fights are my favorite part of the game. Programming these fights was a bit tedious for reasons I'll go into later; however, seeing these fights take form over the course of development was super cool. This was only amplified by watching playtesters enter these fights for the first time and experiencing their attacks.
Code Architecture
Game jams are all about learning new things and growing your abilities and this jam was no exception. The biggest mistake I made with this project was the code architecture. Many elements of this style of game encourage you to set up robust inheritance trees that make adding new content straight forward and simple. This comes with much more work early on to reduce work later on.
Due to the time constraints of the game jam, I skimmed right over this planning phase for the sake of "saving time". This obviously backfired and quickly lead to writing WET code. (WET code is "Writing Everything Twice", an inefficient and often time consuming practice) As someone who is usually on top of things in this regard, this was a humbling reminder how important that planning time is.
On the bright side, I had to solve problems in unique ways to work around the systems I had already added. This lead to my favorite trick I came up with in this jam: projectile targets. This was a very simple script I set up that only held a Unity event that would get fired when that game object got hit. It effectively acted as a middle man in the combat code and it allowed for a ton of flexibility while being extremely simple and effective. For example, setting up destructible crates (as seen in the image) took about 5 minutes thanks to this system.
Quixy
Early concept art made by a friend that is not involved in the project