Pizza Jam : The Well

Summary

A lemmings inspired rat based game about getting rats out of a well. Made over the course of 9ish days for the Pizza Jam.

Making the game

The game jam's theme was a list of sentences / phrases you could choose to base your game off of. There were quite a few phrases that jumped out to me but I decided to go with "Please save our little Rats!". I had this idea about the movie Ratatouille where Remi gets separated from their family for a chunk of the movie. What happens to them in that time? I couldn't really figure out what game to make about that though other than something over the top and ridiculous that would require more time than I had. I had to balance this game jam with work and decorating a flat.

I decided to just draw some lil rats and make a simple grabbing rat mechanic as a prototype while I tried to figure out what the game really was going to be. After doing that, I still didn't really know what the game was but I persevered. At some point I just decided it's kind of like lemmings, so lets do something like lemmings. I had never really made a puzzle game before so it was challenging but fun coming up with levels that had to be solved in new ways.

Ultimately there were only a few mechanics but more I wanted to add, there's the basic mechanic of picking up rats. I had to try find a way to just stop the player being able to just pick up rats and take them to freedom every level, so I added zones that made you drop the rats and that prevents you from picking them up. I then realised that I needed some more variations otherwise the depth of the game would either be pick up rats and take to freedom or pick up rat, drop rat in no rat zone, then re-pick up rat when they are through so I added buttons.

The buttons added more flexibility with what I could do but I thought it'd be fun to also have other mechanics, I only managed to add an inflate mode where instead of grabbing the rats you inflate the and they slowly float up. I did want to add a chuck mechanic, bounce pads and maybe some spikes for danger

Sadly during this jam I had a family emergency which resulted with my Grandad passing away which took my focus from the Jam quite a bit. I did want to do more but I'm still proud and happy with what I got done.

Godot

I used Godot for this project. Most of my experience is in Unity but I wanted to try use Godot more. I've used to mess around in and then the High-5 Rumble game I'm working on slowly. I wanted a break from that project but wanted to continue to use Godot so I thought this Game jam was a good opportunity.

I got to use parts of Godot I haven't got to use before like tile maps and their physics based nodes. It was also a good test to see how re-usable some of the scripts I had made for my other game was and how easy it was to drop in and use.

Art

Art is not my strong suite but I wanted to make a concerted effort to try do more art and push myself. I used my partner's procreate on their ipad to create the art for this game which ended up being a lot of fun. I experimented with brushes and different styles and I was happy with what I achieved. Particularly the rats. I was also working with a tile map so I decided to take the approach championed by Oskar Stålberg of working on the dual grid which ended up really well for me and allowed for quick creation of levels.