What's Inside Me?

I have made it to the end of another jam, and thought this would be a good time for a devlog!

This game was made for the Acerola Jam, where the theme was Aberration. Before the jam began, my plan was to make a platformer, but that didn't end up happening. I spent the first day brainstorming ideas, ranging from a shooter where you are supposed to get hit/miss the enemies, to a stock market simulator with time travel. I thought of doing a platformer with a mirrored world. 

The idea I ended up on was that your character would change randomly. I did have the platformer in my head, but once I started on the character controller I ended up with a top down styled game. 

Within a day or 2 of development, I ended up seeing a video talking about particle effects, so instead of working on game mechanics, I worked on making walking particles and things of that sort. The particles are actually the reason the human character throws daggers, he was originally going to swing a sword. 

Next I created the rest of the 5 characters, the chicken (yes, it looks like a duck), the frog, the crab, and the demon. I tried to make every one of them attack differently, so that it wouldn't just be a reskin when your character changed. 

After that came the enemies, the first being the same as the demon player character. I called the one with the purple eyes big head, and the other a wizard. The haunted sword got added as one of the last things I did before finishing up the game. 

I spent a lot of time tweaking the pause menus, level up system, and the wave spawning. I would say most, if not all of the second week was dedicated to those things. That, and fixing the various bugs that kept popping up (crashes, getting stuck in the wall on changing character, etc).

Overall I had a ton of fun participating in this jam, and got a lot more accomplished than I expected! I've learned an insane amount from this jam that I plan to use in the future! If you play the game, I hope you enjoy it! Feel free to give any feedback on the game, whether good or bad!