Final Week for Jam 2.
Dev Diary #7
After 4 long weeks of development, our game 'Sins of the Squirrels' is finally completed and submitted to the Jam page! Reflecting back on this project, I think a better schedule or plan in which everyone completes their work would have been useful as we only started properly putting the game together during the last week. Unfortunately, this also meant we had to frantically try and fix the many bugs that arose during this time as well, leaving not much time for testing and improving the game's mechanics. As for what I was working on, I spent the first half of the week finishing the player sprites as well as designing and creating a set of boss sprites. Due to the time constraints (and the fact we only assembled the game last minute), these boss sprites never got implemented in the final product, however it is something I plan to add in a future update!
When it came to designing the boss sprites, I knew I wanted it to be a larger, more intimidating dog but couldn't decide on the dog breed to go with. Ultimately, I ended up choosing a chihuahua as I thought it would be funny and also stray away from the stereotypically 'aggressive' dog species (chihuahuas are still very scary though!). Having decided on the species, I experimented with the sprites but found they didn't really look like a chihuahua, and more like a regular dog sprite like the rest of the enemies. To really emphasize that it was a chihuahua, I decided to make its head extra small and give it a pink collar for comedic effect. With the deadline fast approaching, I made the decision to keep the body of the boss the same as the enemy sprites but simply make the sprite bigger in game to save time, however with more time or a future update, I would like to make the sprites completely original and make its muscles and body bigger to appear more intimidating.
After reflecting on the feedback from the previous game jam, something I was keen to improve upon in future projects was the variety of characters, players, enemies etc. Whilst assembling the project, I noticed the continuous waves of one type of enemy started to get boring and blur together, and to combat this, I took the original enemy sprites and re-coloured them to give some variation in dog species attacking. A future update for this game might include even more variations!
One continuous problem we faced with this project was our producer, who after attending the Monday meetups during the first two weeks, completely stop responding to our messages and went radio silent. Fortunately, my teammates for this project were great at communicating and made sure everyone knew what they were doing for the project and helped each other out where necessary. Overall, I felt this project was a success and I am proud of what we were able to make in time time given! I hope to make a future update to this game to include all the features we ran out of time for, as well as fix the remaining bugs!
