Gloom, a game jam and 3 updates later

So this Gloom's first and probably only devlog, announcement and post-mortem.

Gloom was made for the Quarantine Game Jam, that had for theme "a lot of...".

I had the idea of having a lot of enemies chasing you around lots of buildings (i.e. a city).

To do this in a timely manner, I came up with a few models i could mix and match : 

- a first, middle and last floor outer's "shell"

- different interiors that fit into any 1st or middle floor

And on top of that :

- a wall-running wall-jumping controller and its trustee gun

- an enemy that would go to you and kindly kill you

- the associated invisible spawn points

At first I made good time and even found it in me to make a music track. Yay !

BUT... I hit a roadblock when i found a bug that would stop the enemies when their spawner is in a rotated building.

After bashing my head against the wall for far too long, I cobbled up a smallish city and submitted 8 minutes before the deadline.

It still ended 14th in mood (of all things), 44th in theme, 46th in audio and 65th among the 266 entries.

So here are the problems people found with it :

 - the no-cross-hair policy I purposefully chose (I found it original)  made it hard to understand where we aim, before and after the shot

- the enemies were so numerous that players would flee outside the city, which made them miss the whole parkour bit

- the instant death when enemies got too close was really harsh

- there was no incentive to actually parkour.

So I thought about it and I came up with some solutions :

- showing bullet impacts in walls and blood (in v0.1)

- gave the  enemies an attack you could dodge (v0.1)

- a 'visit all lamp posts' goal as an incentive for parkour  (v0.2)

- a grenade to get rid of enemy clumps  (v0.3)

Finally I made a new map and tweaked spawn rates to raise with time. And a goofy intro.

Now, Gloom should be a fun enough game to play.

I don't think I'll come back to it. It taught me a lot and is not really something that could get anywhere because the code is messy. Not horrible, but some things are crooked because I didn't plan ahead. I would make a compilation of tricks I picked up or thought of while making it, but that would be for another post if ever.