72 Hour Game Jam Postmortem for "Robot Citadel Rush"

BIG NEWS! Robot Citadel Rush is now Open Source - https://github.com/MrOnosa/robot-citadel-rush

Intro:

Last weekend, I participated in SoloDevelopment 72-hour Jam #7 which featured the theme "Parts and Upgrades". I was a bit bewildered by the theme at first, but on my drive home from work, I started thinking about what I could do with it. My mind wondered to a DoshDoshington video called Cogmind and the Future of Roguelikes. Cogmind is a roguelike where you play as a robot and try to escape or something. I don't really get it, but it looks awesome.

I thought, hey, I never made a 2D adventure game before. How about a game where you're a robot that beats up enemies and uses their parts as upgrades. Why don't I give that a shot? So that's what I set out to do. 

Game Development:

Nine months ago, I made Flapple: Missiles and Marriage. It did very poorly, only getting 86th out of 199 entries. I must admit, I was pretty bummed out about that for quite a while. I wanted to do better this time around, so I decided to do a few things differently. I was going to use pre-built assets and scope my project upfront.

I went over to Kenney.nl and found this awesome asset pack - https://kenney.nl/assets/micro-roguelike. This was exactly what I needed to build my entire game. I liked the minimalist feel because my game was going to be extremely simple. It had to be, I only had a 1 full weekend day to build it.

Luckily, I've worked with Godot's TileMapLayer nodes before. So, I got to work building a simple dungeon. I put together a robot that could move in the four cardinal directions and bump into walls. Then I built the inventory system, as "parts" was a theme in this jam. Then I set up the enemy NPCs. After that, I built a loot box that the player can bump in to and collect gear. NPC simply spawn a loot box when they die. Finally, after everything else, I build the combat system. 

I saved the combat system for last because I wasn't quite sure how I was going to do it. I had a vague idea of what I wanted to do, but combat was the most flexible part of all this, so to me, it made sense to leave that until the end.

By the end of all that, I had the minimum viable product ready. I uploaded it and went to bed. I knew I could re-upload a better version before the Game Jam ended, so this was more of a "safety save" just in case.

I had very little time on Sunday to add much more to the game. So, I focused on polishing the game. I added little easter eggs like unique dialog when walking over certain tiles. I also added all the music and sound effects.

Music by alkakrab - https://alkakrab.itch.io/free-12-tracks-pixel-rpg-game-music-pack 

Sound Effects by TomMusic - https://tommusic.itch.io/free-fantasy-200-sfx-pack 

Even though it's a short game, I wanted to put some extra work into the music and sfx system. I programmed it so there are 3 music tracks. After a track plays, it pauses for a few seconds, and then plays the next track. Also, restarting the game jumps to the next track. I'm glad I did that. New players die a lot quickly. When I didn't automatically skip the track, the first few notes became quite annoying to hear over and over again.

I also added several sfx for every action. As in, there are many walking sounds, combat sounds, and loot box sounds. I even added a special sfx for picking up the only healing item in the game.

Finally, thanks to some great advice from WootsDev, I added a camera shaking effect to the game. Each attack does a little shake and, I have to admit, it makes the game feel way better. 

The "Shaker" Godot plugin I used - https://github.com/Eneskp3441/Shaker 

Reception:

People would see this game and have 1 of 2 reactions:

1. This looks like an old adventure game!

2. This looks like an old adventure game...

It was quite divisive. Jim, the creator of Dungeonmans, loved it at first sight. They were kind enough to play the game all the way through and really explore the game. They even found a pretty big bug I had overlooked! It was wonderful. Others, however, would look at it and go, "Nope, not for me." So I was pretty worried that it would do poorly in the Game Jam rankings. My anxiety about how poorly Flapple: Missiles and Marriage did was really building up. 

I prepared myself to see my game in the bottom 2/3rds of the rankings. Well, I was pleasantly surprised to find out I got 9th! 9th out of 65 entries! I know it's just a silly completion with nothing to win or lose, but it felt a m a z i n g ! ! ! 

What Makes My Game Unique:

This may be a bit unusual, but I like purely deterministic games. Winning or losing to a dice roll is great, don't get me wrong, but there is a lack of games where you can really plan out every move confidently. There is a lot of fun in that discovery process. So, I purposefully built the game to clearly state all the information needed up front. Combat is as simple as max((attack - defense, 1). You attack first, they attack next, no exceptions, no dice rolls.

This can lead into some interesting strategies. Most players will attack an NPC over and over again until it dies, but others really take advantage of the turn based nature of the game. Swapping gear between attacks or running over to the Health item before the final blow are ways to solve the dungeon in unique ways.

People seemed to like that. Some would comment that this felt more like a puzzle game than a traditional adventure game. And, I'm fine with that! I think that's an interesting aspect to my game. It's not the first to do it, but there aren't a lot of other games like it to my knowledge.

What's Next for Robot Citadel Rush:

I want to keep working on this game. I want to build 10 interesting levels, each with multiple paths to victory. I see ways to make the game less punishing to casual players while keeping it interesting for hard-core types. It's simple enough in scope that I might be able to take this all the way to my first ever published steam game. That is a dream I've had for a long time.

This will be my 4th game I said I might take it all the way to a Steam release ☺