Chillscapes 0.1 Released for NEOC#03 Rhythm Game Jam

Chillscapes was submitted to the NEOC#03 Rhythm Game Jam yesterday. Unfortunately, this was the first time I had attempted to build a Windows executable and send it to someone else to use. I identified (post-jam) a dependency was required to run the executable. I uploaded a new version (0.1.1) that only changes how the executable was built, the code remains the same.

Overall, I think Chillscapes was a success. I shipped a game-like thing using my custom game engine Kludgine, and it’s a fun little diversion that I may revisit in the future.

Accomplishments

Going into the game jam, I thought my engine was pretty close to being able to be used. I figured I could brute-force anything I didn’t need, as long as I kept the scope small enough. I’m going to write a separate update on my community forums in a few days diving into the retrospective of where I want to take Kludgine moving forward. For now, I want to reminisce over what all was accomplished to pull this off in two weeks:

Conceptualization

The concept came to me fairly quickly after I saw the game jam on itch.io. I saw the Rhythm game category with a 2-week deadline, and I knew it was the jam for me. I browsed /r/INAT to see if any composers stuck out to me, and one of the newest posts was from a composer looking to join a jam! I reached out to Pxzel, and after listening to some of his lo-fi tracks, I proposed this layering “experience” to him and he was on-board.

I pitched the idea to WhiteVault, and he loved the idea of helping out. The initial concept didn’t change throughout the two weeks, although many of the ideas for enriching the playing experience were passed on for time constraint reasons.

Perservering through “something”

The first week of the jam went by quickly and smoothly, but over the course of the past week, I’ve struggled with being overly tired. I track my sleep, and my patterns were about the same as always, except I found myself napping every day of the past week. This is incredibly uncharacteristic for me – I usually am never able to actually fall asleep if I try to take a nap, but I did every day this past week.

There were a few days I accomplished nothing. Thankfully I was able to pull through at the end and get enough polish that I wasn’t embarrased by the submission’s quality. There are still a few lingering bugs that I will probably fix in the coming weeks.

And in case anyone is worried about that nebulous symptom, I am feeling better now.

Created a keyframe-based animation system

When thinking about how to synchronize sprite animations and opacity changes to the beats in the music, I could either approach it by writing something completely custom for Chillscapes or I could try to write something generic as part of Kludgine. I chose the latter.

The system that is currently in place works, but it’s something I will definitely be revisiting in my upcoming Kludgine-oriented retrospective. I was hoping to create something that worked as easily as some of the Javascript animation APIs, but in the end what I created is much more verbose.

Leveraged Kludgine’s Component System

While I do plan on cleaning the code up in the coming weeks, I was able to leverage the component system in Kludgine to separate responsibilities and try to encapsulate related functionality. Overall, I was really happy with how this API is working.

I added more Component “events” such as hovered/unhovered, and through the jam I fixed many minor issues relating to Kludgine’s layout and styling system.

Shipped Something

One of the biggest accomplishments can’t be understated enough; it shipped. I tried my hand at another jam a few months ago, and it didn’t go well at all. I’m really happy that everything came together, and it accomplished the core of the concept we were aiming for.

I love how the art and music turned out and the overall feeling of experiencing the music.

What’s next?

Well that largely depends. Did you try it and enjoy it? Let us know! I do have some small plans to iterate on the project in the coming weeks, but mostly to clean up the code rather than to add features. But if people are interested in seeing this expanded to more scenes and more functionality, I’d love to expand upon this concept.