Hello and welcome to the very first devlog of my very first Game Jam! I thought I'd take a quick moment to run you through the various mechanics of our game and explain why we made the gameplay descisions we did. Our process has been very organic, with all three members contributing ideas and helping refine the core mechanics. I think that this has resulted in us making some interesting choices.

I'm Chiral, a freelance pixel artist aspiring to be on an indie team someday. I've been working with coder Boykalaand composer/audio engineer RocaMocha. The game we are making is our take on a "Metroid-Vania." Instead of jumping and platforming, you'll be in a top down perspective, bobbing and weaving through enemies. We got a bit of a late start on this project, only coming together a week after the jam began. Despite this, we've made lots of progress in the last week and are currently at the halfway point before the due date. But enough background, lets talk gameplay!

Programming began with player movement. Once we had the player moving responsively to the WASD buttons we started adding weapons, eventually deciding to make the arrow keys control the direction of attack seperate from the player's movement. This is similar to the controls of the arcade classic Berzerk, and we added to that retro-mechanical vibe by making bullets act like they do in Galaga. This means the player has a limit to how many bullets appear on screen rather than a set rate of fire, so point blank the rate of fire is as fast as you can tap the button. Lastly, we added a whip so the player can use the iconic weapons from both Castlevania and Metroid in the same game.

From here I came up with some characters based on the sprites I had made and the story began to come together. You are a vampire nobleman who wakes up when aliens crash into his castle. Now you must run through the halls of the castle eradicating the alien infestation before it spreads further! Pretty bare bones, but I like to keep things vague and follow the gameplay, not try to make gameplay fit into a prewritten story.

For the aliens themselves, I drew a simple blob monster. These creatures slide along the ground towards the player and will form up with other nearby blobs, growing in the process. Attacking them with melee will only split them in half, but the gun will shrink them until they die.

We've come a long way in just a week, and we've got two more to go! Please try out our demo and let us know what you think! Remember, that's only a week worth of game, so its very unpolished! Good luck to all our fellow devs competing in this Game Jam, and thanks to Mr QuickGame for hosting it!