Shoot-a-Can Jr.
Postmortem: Shoot-a-Can Jr.
What fun putting this game together was. GMTK 2021 was by no means my first game jam, but it is the first 48-hour deadline game jam that I have taken on solely by myself. I've been making games as a hobbyist now for about a year and half, and my previous jam experience has mostly been in longer forms. So let's talk the pitch, the bad, and the good:
Truth be told I was itching to make a puzzle game prior to the theme announcement. When I saw "Joined Together", the first thing I thought was some kind of Match-3. I was expecting many more matching oriented puzzle games to be submitted, so I suppose I was wrong on that front. The idea was to make an action puzzle game where "joining together" would be seen on multiple levels: Matching colors, joining two genres, and having some sort of supply chain reaching the masses. A soft drink supply chain with only four types of soda is what I ended up on, primarily on the idea that a can would be fun to animate.
I love old games, and I am particularly enamored with early NES black box games and their simultaneously commonplace and wild qualities. When I play it, I get vibes of Wrecking Crew, Dr. Mario, Yoshi, and maybe Wario's Woods or Donkey Kong 3. It's kind of odd to so fondly reminisce about (and even revere) these lovely but ultimately mediocre games. The "Jr." in the title is a cheeky homage to these arcadey type games, I figured it would help like-minded players (see: people who like bad games) find it in the sea of other games. So if anyone else played it and picked up on those vibes, I guess this one was for you?
The challenges were primarily in getting these cans to stack up just right. My programming knowledge for "physics" goes as far as moving things pixel by pixel. I knew this going in, and even though all matching games usually have horizontal and vertical matches, I went vertical only for this to mitigate potential frustrations with the logic. I suppose the spatial element of the borders and the collision boxes for the cans, on top of having to resolve the thrown cans, their different speed, and defining thrown and stationary states wigged me out a bit. All in all the system came together okay, but there are certainly bugs in the current state of the game that I figured would be so infrequent that they wouldn't necessarily ruin anyone's experience. Having hacked it together, I am confident that I could replicate it in a much sturdier and consistent way.
The issue that kept me up late at night was determining how to enter the losing state when the cans encroached too close to the player. This issue was a compromise, because the thrown cans were programmed in such a way that if the encroaching stationary cans were too close to the player, they could still be thrown and result in spurious matches. Ideally, in a Shoot-a-Can Sr., the cans would stack infinitely off screen and minimize the player's movement space until they're hit by a car or the player themselves.
A lot of things went really well on the project. The first assets were the cans and player sprites, and I'm really happy with both. The colors pop, and I tried to add a sort of color accessibility option with the letters associated with each color. I hadn't quite thought up the "next piece" interface being the smaller cans at that point, so I may have shot myself in the foot in that way. I'd love to hear if this helped anyone, or if I ended up botching it in the end. The player character is very simple, but against the colors and other elements I think it all has just enough personality to sing. I come from an art school background but can't draw, so whenever something reads "game" and "fun" to me I consider it a success.
The sounds are also a real win to me, less so because of the quality and more so that I was able to add a lot of my personality to the game. I had previously used Famitracker for all my previous game sounds, but the application seemed to be entirely broken on my machine so I made the switch to Famistudio about 1-2 weeks before the jam. I am an electric bass player and can shed out a 12-bar blues in F like it's nothing, but putting it into Famistudio was surprisingly challenging, and was a good brain exercise for something that is usually muscle memory on an instrument. It fit all the requirements: Felt old school and arcadey, and could be looped at least a couple times before getting old.
The balance was a bit tough, but I think I ended up on something that rewards patience and careful, optimized play. I am ecstatic that players found the "LUCKY" strategy based on the feedback in the comments. While it is a bit one dimensional and relies heavily on NES Tetris real-random style luck, I hope that players have figured it out and found the fun in whatever way it may exist.
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Thanks for reading along! I hope to get back to playing more jam games before the judging period ends. If any of this was interesting to you, I've got the link below to the rating page right here. My Twitter is boring but I'll keep making games like this, so you may want to follow along for my absurd axe throwing RPG or snow shoveling adventure game.
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