hey there how's it going so game jams are kind of my thing here on youtube and because of that i get
contacted every now and then to either join or judge one so when i was contacted by the creator
of the youtube channel csdojo about the kajam running on a platform they're working with called
replit i took a look replit is a free in-browser ide to help people code in more than 50 languages
it also has this really neat feature where you can code at the same time as your collaborators
kind of like using google docs which is all cool except for the fact that i'm not really focused on
programming or being a programmer and i don't even really know one programming language to be honest
my focus when making games is on design and user experience and the only tool i use is construct
3 which is a game engine that has a more visual based coding process i still write all the logic
for the games that i make but it doesn't require me to stare at walls of text and write a bunch of
syntax it's a process in a way of working that's great for me and what i want to make at the moment
so after checking it out i had to reply that unfortunately i can't take part due to not really
being able to quote unquote code properly then i was made aware that because replit supports html
a web build from other engines like unity can be used and it would probably work with construct as
well so i did a quick test and it totally worked i just swapped out a few files and it runs great
they asked if i would still want to take part and show off this feature and i was in so thank you
to replit and kaboom for sponsoring this video and having me as a guest participant in judge
it's an honor to join other content creators like polymars jabrils arcade anya buttwi levin
and tech with tim to make some fun experiences and just share the joy of making games overall
the jam ran through october 18th through the 25th at this point i'm still coming back from the break
that i took because i burned out quite heavily and i was ready to keep up the momentum rolling from
ludumdari my number one goal for the jam like last time is to keep my scope in check and make
something that i think is fun sometimes i go into a jam with a mechanic or idea that i want to force
like i did in my last sudamdara game where i really wanted to play with my portal pong idea
there's a card up top if you missed that video this time though i went into the jam with nothing
in particular that i wanted to make i decided to spend my entire stream the first day brainstorming
and planning with my twitch chat which i definitely needed because the theme for kajam is
huge and i had nothing for a long time in a 48 hour jam the pressure is there to come up with
an idea and start working as soon as possible although even in that situation i've still been
finding it more helpful to slow down and dedicate some time to actual brainstorming and coming up
with a plan and since kajam is a week long i really wanted to make sure that i had a solid
foundation for what i was going to make but i'll be real i was having a tough time with the theme
huge just didn't initially spark any ideas for me my twitch chat and i came up with a
bunch of different concepts but nothing really clicked several of them were pretty neat ideas
but just not possible with the amount of time i had to actually work on the project or i thought
they were too much of a low-hanging fruit and i figured there would be plenty of other games doing
the exact same thing when approaching a game jam concept i like to try to do something as unique
as i can so i don't just get lost in the crowd of similar game ideas lately i've been playing a lot
of spelunky too so a jack and the beanstalk idea where you're traveling down the beanstalk trying
to escape from a huge giant seems fun while i wasn't completely hooked on the idea the concept
of traversing down from a huge height seemed like it could be a good one especially if i added
something like the slow fall cave from spelunky that led me down the line of thinking to super
mario world where the cape originated from to the segments where you're falling through a bunch of
coins trying to collect as many as you can washing windows on a huge building was eventually thrown
out and the spark was finally lit making a score based platformer where you run around
cleaning windows is just out there enough that it seems like a game i could have played back in the
arcade in the 90s we continued to brainstorm and i had a plan to make a game like spelunky where
you started out at the top of a building and then you traveled your way down dodging birds and other
hazards to clean as many windows as you can the next day on stream we got to work creating the
basic mechanics we had a player that could run and jump and while falling you could open up a
parachute to slow your descent i added windows that would be dirty until the player passed over
them there was a thought about making the player need to take an action to actually clean the
windows but i wanted to make the game more focused on quick movement and stopping to press a button
on every window would really make the pace of the game stagger in my opinion once the player falls
past the windows and lands on the floor there's not really much they can do to clean the windows
anymore instead of making it a one-time drop where you clean the windows and that's all you get i
added an elevator that would transport the player back to the top of the building so they could drop
again next up was adding some checks for the fall speed of the player if they're falling too
fast the windows won't be cleaned to avoid people just dropping straight down i also added in a live
system that way if you fell too fast you would lose a life and you'd have three total kind of
fitting into the old classic arcade style so the player will need to clean as many windows as they
can within a time limit or before they lose all of their lives to enhance the gameplay i added some
pickups like a double jump a dash and a speedup and i made a huge level with lots of windows to
begin testing actual gameplay mechanics because we're going for an arcade high score type game we
added in scoring obviously the more i played with the mechanics the more i really liked the gliding
and i wanted to encourage that type of gameplay so to incentivize the type of gameplay that i wanted
to encourage the player receives a multiplier for every window they clean without touching the
ground this can make the scores get big really fast and i was envisioning people trying to
optimize their play to get huge multipliers but to prevent people from just slowly gliding through as
many windows as they can we added in a timer to help encourage them to find a better route and
to encourage that we added a pickup that would add more time to your timer whenever collected i threw
in a bounce pad because it's me and i'm making a platformer game and if i don't add a bounce pad to
a platformer game what am i really doing in game dev at this time i still thought there would be
a bit more running around on ledges and using the bounce pads to get up and down areas but i
hadn't fully figured out the level progression yet i added things like open windows to use as hazards
that the player needs to avoid because from the perspective of the world nobody wants someone to
come and spray water into their open window and we topped off the stream by adding a camera zoom to
be able to show off the full size of the building the theme of the jam is huge after all and we need
to make sure the player can see the scale of the whole building compared to you so that way when
the camera's zoomed in you understand that it's still huge with a lot of the basic mechanics in
i went into the weekend needing to figure out what the game was going to look like and since i don't
stream on the weekend i settled in to work without the distraction of streaming and started in on the
art i grabbed a palette from lowspec.com as always and this time i'm using rampy 16 made by anub
although more so than usual i used this palette as a foundation and i added many of my own colors
even when i do this i still prefer to start with a palette because it's nicer to have a good base to
start with because i was going to have to make a huge building i went for a base scale of my player
of 16 by 16 pixels and i tried to keep the details as light as i could to make animation easier later
i created the key poses for all of the players states like idle gliding hit dashing jump and fall
and an extra one for falling too fast and after that it was time for the thing i was dreading
which is the building itself i had no idea where to start making a building in this scale so i took
to the internet to look for some inspiration i found this really great image from the arcade
version of wreck-it ralph and i used that as my reference point for my building it has a classic
video game look without being too detailed or too plain like i said i've never made a building this
large before and it caused some unique challenges that i wasn't expecting i'm used to working
on pixel art that i can see the details all at once while it's on screen but this building is
literally so huge that i can't actually work on a pixel level and see it all at the same time i
added in platforms throughout the building that the player could stand on i originally tried to
make them look like they fit a little bit more with the building but they were blending in a bit
too much so i added a darker outline and a darker color to make sure that the player knew that that
was a platform and not something that they could just pass through the rows and rows of windows
was getting a bit too repetitive so i deleted some and added in some pillars to just break up
the monotony i then spent a good amount of time working on a lot of the ancillary art things like
power ups making the animations for the players the elevators etc while adding the art into
the game i wanted to make sure that cleaning the windows would feel as rewarding as getting a coin
in a game like mario so i added a flash animation to the windows and made them bulge a little bit as
the player passed by them to make sure you could really tell there was a change while testing i
wasn't liking the way that when hitting an open window or falling from too high would actually
make you lose life the point of the game is to get as many windows cleaned as possible before the
timer runs out losing life doesn't really enhance that in any way so i repurposed it into a stun
that would make the player fall and lose a few seconds before they could get up and keep moving
just to make sure there was an adequate penalty if you did hit an open window and got stunned
it takes away your multiplier and to be honest i felt this better serve the idea of the game
and helped improve the game flow i also changed a few other things from the initial idea that just
didn't really fit with the game flow either i was going to have birds and other random hazards that
would get in the player's way but i really like the idea that players could try to optimize their
movement to get a huge score this is also the reason that i chose not to make any elements of
the level randomized i had thought about making elements like the location of open windows and
pickups change each time you play but once again that didn't really enhance the playstyle that i
wanted so i opted to have a static level that the players could learn and really optimize
then it was time for the boring stuff like the menus how to play credits all that fun jazz as
well as adding music and sound effects which i just pulled from my library of purchased assets
the jam ended monday night so i was able to stream my final touches as well as get the
community to play test to see if they can find any bugs this is seriously one of the biggest
benefits to not overscoping and working right up until the deadline we as designers of our
games will never see and play them the same way as our players will we're just too close to the
project and used to the way that we play it so there's a lot of things that we have blinders to
my community made a bunch of great suggestions as well as found numerous small bugs that would
have caused problems if they had not been fixed a huge thank you to everyone that was there and
helped out you're all awesome we then exported the game and transferred the files into replit
it's literally as easy as unzipping the export and replacing the base files from the html ripple
dude it's so cool
it's so cool it just works how does it just work and after a bit more testing fixing
re-exporting to make sure that everything was working as intended here's the game
window washer and the huge hotel is a classic high score arcade game the player has 30 seconds
to glide down the front of the hotel and clean as many windows as they can before the time runs out
they can glide to increase their horizontal distance but watch out for open windows the
people inside will not be happy if you clean the inside of their room for them players can pick up
time bonuses which will add five seconds to their timer and there are three special power-ups to
pick up as well a double jump a dash and a speed increase once the player reaches the ground they
can take one of three elevators back to the top to descend again the timer does stop while you're in
the elevator because it felt a bit unfair to keep it running while the player doesn't have control
cleaning multiple windows without touching the ground will give you a multiplier per window to
your score when landing on the ground or ledge or being stunned the multiplier will reset to zero
and must be started again there are 999 dirty windows in total and at the end of the run the
game will save the highest score achieved as well as the most number of windows cleared in one run
we did some testing and looked at the numbers i don't think it's actually possible to clean
all 999 and i'm kind of okay with that because it's more about maxing out your efficiency to
get the best numbers you can but keeping track of both score and the number of windows clean
gives the player two different goals to go into the game with so they have options of how they
would like to play overall i'm really happy with this game and i feel that the game look was tight
and enjoyable i've really liked playing it i had many people on my stream telling me they
were trying to optimize their play to get as high of score as they can or a high window count i'll
throw on one fun mistake i made and i'm just calling it an easter egg instead and that's the
jump pad remember that thing while i was designing the levels i realized that my initial thought of
the player running between different platforms and jumping up and down the building was just not
going to work as i wanted to focus on the gliding so since i limited the number of platforms i just
stuck the placeholder jump pad off to the side and figured i would either add it into the game
later or just delete it but it turns out i didn't do either and in the game if you gather all three
power-ups you can jump dash and glide your way over to the far top right of the level where it
still sits floating in the air and you can land on it and use it to bounce which then gives you
the ability to jump over the bounds of the level and get completely outside of the game boundaries
okay we got plenty of time now okay there it is
and we're out yeah totally out of the world
i found this to be hilarious and not a problem because it requires knowing that it's there as
well as all three power-ups so instead of going back removing it re-exporting the game and all
of that i just left it and figured hey if you can find it and you can get out have fun now it's just
swag you can pull off and since the timer isn't too long and you need to collect all the other
power-ups first you're not stuck outside the play area forever or soft locked or anything like that
once the timer counts down you just restart as normal the kajam ended with almost 400 projects
submitted and there are some really cool ideas to check out there will be a link in the description
to check out my game as well as all of the other games submitted to the jam thank you so much to
replit and kaboom for sponsoring this video i had an absolute blast taking part in this jam
and i'm extremely happy with the game i produced if you're a coder please check out replit it's a
great in-browser ide with more than 50 languages supported and as i found it's super easy to port
over projects from other engines as well thank you for watching and i hope you enjoyed this look into
the creation of the game if you did hitting the like button would be very much appreciated and
if you want to see more be sure to subscribe if you have any questions would like to chat with
me or would like to be there when i'm working on future jams check out my live streams at twitch.tv
venmark we also have a discord full of amazing and helpful people i need to give a huge thank
you to my patreon supporters for help making these videos possible especially my video producer to
your patrons like clone 13 cortland massam curdle games nightfall it's jeppy jed kevin
haugau killboy gaming matsy makes nazar salim salty pretzel scott hansen soapy gnome straight
up gruntled and warren steven rose you're all amazing people and i truly appreciate the support
thank you again for watching and i will talk with you next time have a good one later
you