It has been a while! I have been hard at work creating Fingeance with Escape Industries these past few months. We have been making some HUGE strides in finishing up the game, but there is still a long way to go until we are done. But in the meantime, we all participated in the Global Game Jam this year. The Global Game Jam is an event where you are tasked creating a game based a theme within 48 hours. This year’s theme was Ritual. Although we all participated, we decided that we all were going to work on separate project in different groups. This year I decided to try working on a game project by myself.
Enter Neon Ritual
I wanted to see how much I have learned since I worked on Glitch in the System. I wanted to see if I could make a polished prototype within a 2-day period, which is how much time it took me to make the original prototype for Glitch in the System. The other reason I wanted to work on this particular project was because I have been kicking around this project idea for a while now. I have had a concept for a 2D platformer that I have been wanting to work on for a while and this event gave me an outlet to work on it. So I took the opportunity and made Neon Ritual.
Neon Ritual is a 2D multiplayer platformer game where you race to get to altars to perform a rituals and gain orbs. It is an intense shooter where up to 4 players can play. It definitely was an ambitions game to make in 48 hours, but I felt like I was up to the challenge and was glad that I did it.
During the Game Jam
Working on the game was pretty intense, it was pretty hard trying to balance working on all of the parts of the game. I had to balance art, design, programming, and music during the game jam and it was tough. I ended up coding for most of the time, following art and design, and last was music with just about an hour to spare, I had to crank out a track that I started working on from a while ago in order finish on time. It was tough but it wasn’t what I will remember the most from the jam.
I participated in the jam at the GameCraft Jam Site, where there were 133 other registered jammers around me, working hard on their own projects in their own teams and it was awesome to get small glimpses of what other groups were creating. One of the most surprising things is that I started to become the go-to guy in my area for Unity questions. It started with me helping out a couple of friends with questions then other people overheard that I knew things so then they asked questions, soon there were questions coming in pretty regularly. This was the first time I realized that this wasn’t like when I worked on Glitch in the System, still trying to learn how Unity works, this time I had a lot more experience. I was humbled that people decided to go to me to look for answers, I really appreciate it.
Darkays does Twitter
One of the coolest things that I think I did during the jam was Live tweet my progress. I had a lot of fun tweeting out some GIFs and pics of the game while I was working. I found it really motivating for me to work because I could see the last time that I posted up something which motivated me to keep moving so it wouldn’t take too long on a particular part of the game.
In the future I will definitely do this again it was so much fun and apparently other saw my tweets as well! I heard from many people that they saw my tweets and followed my progress which is awesome!
So… How did it turn out?
It turned out pretty well! I brought the game to a special edition of PLAY/TEST last week and the response was really well received. People had a lot of fun battling it out in the game for each of those sacred orbs.
Some glaring problems did rear its head though, for instance, players kept closing the game or skipping the results because people were in the middle of doing things and then the game ends abruptly. The main problem I seen, however, was how difficult it was for me to explain how to play. Especially when I started out the night I was at a loss for how to play the game with lots of, “Wait… How do you do this?” moments because there were no instructions or button prompts.
The Future of Neon Ritual
Building Neon Ritual was so much fun and a great success, in my opinion. I plan on really expanding on the game in every way in the next coming months. I want to fix up all of the problems that the game has now, add in new modes and weapons, make a single player mode and so on. In other words, I have my work cut out for me. I also plan on having a Full Release of the game after all of the improvements are in, super exciting!
If you want to try out the game for yourself, you can download the game here: Neon Ritual by Charles McGregor (itch.io)
Like the art style of the game? Struggling to figure out how to play? Missed these questions at the end of my articles? Leave a message below and let me know!