UUU Post Mortem

I am excited to once again deliver a game, and while it may be a jam game and a bit unpolished, it’s still such a rush to create something that others play, and (hopefully) find enjoyment in. As I mentioned in my post-mortem on Jelly Float(which I made for a game jam last year), it’s been a long time since I’ve been in the habit of regularly making games. However, the Playdate is the perfect little console to get me back into it. It’s hard to beat the feeling of actually seeing something you made on a physical console versus just seeing it through a computer screen.

Anyway, now that’s it been about a month, I wanted to reflect a little on my experiences with making the game, some of the ideas that remained on the cutting room floor, and where I’d like to take it next.

Ideation

So a little around my personal circumstances at the time of the jam. My wife had just broken her ankle while hiking about two weeks prior and had surgery a couple days before. So we were in a hotel, as our third floor apartment had no stairs, and we wanted to avoid the arduous climb a few days following the surgery. The jam started around the time her nerve blocker started to wear off, so I happened to be up helping her around 3-4am to see the three theme announcements: Metal, Night, Below Zero.

The last jam, I went with my first idea, and it took half the jam time to realize that I did not have the skills to pull it off in the time frame allowed, so I wanted to give myself more space to ideate this time, so I wouldn’t feel as rushed at the end. Sometimes it feels like my brain thinks in platformers, so that’s where my mind initially went. I had a few different ideas floating around for each of the themes, however the one I thought would be the most interesting was my idea revolving magnetism and metal, and having a character be able to pull themselves around the screen with a magnet. A penguin holding the magnet came to mind from remnants of my Below Zero ideas, and after I came up with the UUU title, my course was set.

The Title

So it can be seen in the logo, but UUU’s name came from a few places. The first inspiration, which is pretty clear is from the excellent VVVVVV, which doesn’t have the same mechanics, but is a bit similar and also an amazing game I really enjoy. However, the real title comes from changing the orientation of the U’s.

The first U, upside down makes the shape of a penguin. The second U, rotated 90 degrees with a line over it is the shorthand for “with” in the medical field. The third U looks like a magnet. So there you have it, nothing too deep, but that’s how I came up with UUU.

Learning from Jelly Float

Graphically speaking, I wasn’t really jazzed with how Jelly Float came out. I really like the concept, and I spent a lot of time on that, however the tiling especially was pretty bad, and not as detailed as the image I had in my head of it.

While it doesn’t make game developing any easier, I have a hard time getting into the development if graphically it doesn’t look at least somewhat close to a final product, so I wanted to spend more time making the world feel lived in. That became the impetus for all the bouncing background elements in UUU. I thought it be fun to give the trees, hills, mushrooms and spikes a face and movement, which I think made things look a little more dynamic. I would have liked to make a background, but I'm still satisfied with how it came out.

I also added in the coins as a response to feedback from Jelly Float. That world was too empty, and exploring around wasn’t as fun without more interaction. In UUU, I wanted to give a more of a 100%-able experience and a reason to explore more areas of the different screens.

Overall, I think UUU was a step up from Jelly Float and I’m really proud of how it came out!

Scrapped Mechanics

Due to the time constraints of game jam, it is inevitable that certain pieces of functionality would be dropped, and UUU is no exception to this. I definitely have a lot of ideas of where to push this, but here are just a few of the ideas I didn’t get around to implementing:

• Magnetic enemies: Originally I wanted to allow the magnet to repel and attract enemies, such as pull spikes off the ceiling, or pushing mobile enemies into holes to allow for safe travel
• Magnetic coins: I wanted the magnet to work on coins as well, and pull them toward you, but on the fence of if this would make things more interesting or not
• Magnet Battery Life: In going with the metroidvania style of play, this was meant to be a key upgrade, and you’d start out only being able to use the magnet for a short period of time, and that time would increase as you got batteries to power it for longer at a time. There would be a GUI bar that indicated the current level to make it visual. However, halfway through, I decided I didn’t have the time to make this work. However, some of the game was designed for this and adapted once it’s removed. The rooms with several tall pillars around halfway through the game were a relic of this. Originally the game would have you navigate past them, then go up them after looping through some of the starting areas of the game and having more juice in the magnet

• A Storyline: … yeah, ran out of time on this one. The basic idea in my head was the classic video game setup of the penguin’s partner being stolen by an evil penguin, and using your trusty magnet you have to get them back. My original concept had the evil penguin having a big robot mech suit, that you would magnet into a pit during a boss battle, but despite always wanting to make bosses, I never find time during a jam for them :D

Scalability

It doesn’t scale. I thought this would be a fun place to go into a little more of the weeds of how the magnet navigation works, and it was definitely a sub optimal implementation. I figured out a better way to do it when implementing the magnetic boxes, but it was too late at that point for me to want to gut the rest of the game, so here’s the gory details of how it currently works.

All the level design was done using LDtk, which is a really great tool. The image below shows all the entities at play in the first screen. You might be able to tell from looking, but the magnets embedded in walls are only tiles, nothing more. I created an invisible entity for each metal block to say if the penguin can use its magnet within them. They have an attribute if they are able to allow up and down mobility or side to side. I have a hunch that spawning all these, which are still AnimatedSprite objects, despite not having a sprite, could be the reason why it lags between screens, but I haven’t looked into it yet.

With the magnet boxes, I was looking the the Playdate documentation, and found there was a way to check for collisions within a rectangle that wasn’t just the player’s collision box, which I think was much better, and I wish I had done that here. But it’s all experience, and the more creative games I get the opportunity to make, the more I’ll sharpen my understanding of the SDK.

Opportunities for Improvement

As mentioned in my Jelly Float post-mortem, as much as I’d like to be different, sound design isn’t a high priority when I’m game developing. I respect it a lot, but growing up I was only allowed to play my video games on special occasions, usually family parties or long car rides, so I pretty much played games on mute for most of my life.

I avoided the really awful sound effect issue I had with Jelly Float by the fact that UUU has no sound at all. I was down to the wire for submission, and did not have the time to make any ungodly magnet buzzing or thumping sound effects, so maybe that’s a good or bad thing.

The screen shake when magnetting into a wall was also not what I wanted. Ideally it would shake once when making contact, but I struggled making that work as I wanted, so the whole screen vibrates the whole time, and it destroys the games performance. So, I definitely wish I had done that better.

I’ve had some feedback about the controls being a bit stiff, and it being hard to know when magnet surfaces are off screen, so definitely some good feedback I want to work on. 

The walruses were definitely at the wrong scale, but I was too crunched to spend the time to fix that, so either it’s a really big penguin or a very small walrus.

There’s definitely a few other bugs here, and there, and I’d like to go in and polish up the jam version a bit, even though in the long run I’d like to create a more full experience. I also was very lax in terms of the page on itch, as well as the branding of the game itself within the Playdate, so I’d like to get that a little cleaner as well.

The Future

Honestly, I have a pretty poor history of expanding jam games out into full projects (I’m sorry You Do Jump, one day I’ll return to you). Even back in my flash days, I rarely made anything other than Jam games. I’d really like to fix that trend, and maybe UUU will be the prototype that against all odds becomes a final product. Or something else will come along and distract me. It’s anyones guess, but I have so many ideas for how I want to expand on this concept that I plan to put my best foot forward of making it into a full game experience.

I have a few prototypes in work, and some jams I want to participate in, so who knows what else will fall into my lap in the coming months. Outside of the Playdate dev space, I was able to get one of my old flash games working with Ruffle, so I’d like to go through and rescue all my old games and package them together into a Basement Collection/Terry’s Other Games kind of thing, more for my own nostalgia than anything else.

Jam Results

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the results of the competition. There were so many great entries, but UUU actually won the jam, and had the highest score from the three judges. Honestly, I was blown away by the positive feedback and score. I never really thought something I made could have that kind of reaction, and it really made my day, and was very exciting!

Thanks to the judges and Uncrank’d team for putting on this jam, it’s been a real treat to participate and be a part of this community within a community.

Definitely go check out the rest of the submissions, there were some excellent ones out there!

In closing, these were my initial thoughts going through the experience, and I hope you enjoyed reading them and playing the game! Feel free to leave some feedback on it, I’d love to hear it and get more ideas of how to improve UUU wherever it ends up going in the future!