Ayqua Minus 1: Target Practice Post-Mortem

In April, I launched the Ayqua Youtube channel and Twitter account, where I discussed the making of a world of bugs with Sally, and and then posted a devlog on the game.

I dislike composing videos, even though I like other visual media, such as comics and video games. So I am going to return to my habit of blog updates, especially during my current life chaos. But it is poor marketing to not make a video, so I will also aim to read this blog post onto YouTube. It’s low-effort, but the video needs to exist, and it’s the most effort I can spare.

Also, due to current time constraints, I think I’m going to promise to try to release one video per month, no more. I just can’t get anything else done if I take a more audience-building-friendly once or twice per week schedule.

Yesterday, I released the first minigame in the Ayqua series. Ayqua Minus One: Target Practice, alongside a trailer, with music by Mononoki, a musician I happen to like and hope to one-day hire to score my games. The trailer uses an old Mononoki song I bought in an royalty free asset-pack; the music in the game itself was part of other royalty-free asset packs by other musicians who deserve patronage, to be sure, but are not on my short list to score games. I just had to work with what I had. Mononoki’s music pack didn’t quite fit the gameplay itself, mostly due to the length of the songs.

Yesterday I also launched ayqua.itch.io, where you can play the game. It asks for a $1 donation, but you can skip it and play for free. I recommend the Windows version as more stable than the web version.

Ayqua Minus One is called Ayqua Minus One because it is meant to be a proof of concept of the physics and the art style, and I judge it to be roughly two games before I reach a level of development where I think I will summon the banners, build a kickstarter, and launch and indie studio. Therefore, I welcome criticism. I am already deeply aware of the fact that this game is not my final product or aim. Moreover, while I think a lot of criticism that takes the form of “maybe you should do this, or that” is off-base, because the player doesn’t have the whole of the wont of the design thundering about inside his skull, such criticism can still point the designer to worthy considerations. Perhaps the pain point is real, but is best solved by a different technique. Or perhaps it is intentional, necessary to the game design, but the designer can do a better job of communicating it to the players, such that a player for whom the design is not meant can say, “ah, I see, this was made for someone else. I shall recommend it to him.”

My ultimate aim in making Ayqua games is exploring Ayqua, a fantasy world of bugs, in a format both I and Sally can appreciate. Sally favors Japanese style RPGs, but enjoys the occasional platformer, I favor action adventure games, especially platformers, and especially the so-called Metroidvanias.

So the ultimate aim is to arrive at something like Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, where there is a top-down world map to explore, but then towns, dungeons, and enemy encounters are conducted from a 2D platforming perspective with RPG elements mixed in.

However, my love of Sonic 3&K and Megaman X leads me to aim for a game that permits a player to “Surf” the game world, as can a mid-level Sonic player or a high-level Megaman X player.

Thus, Ayqua Minus One, where you can run on walls, but you need a run button, and you fight with a short knife.

As a final addition, I want the game to look like one of my ink drawings.

So, as of last devlog, on YouTube, above, I had created a beetle who can run, jump, and swing his knife in four directions, a bee target, which I’m choosing to call a bee mine even though it doesn’t explode when you touch it, and I had committed to trying to release a minigame where you destroy targets under a time limit by May 11th. As of my writing this, it is June 11th, and I just released it.

There’s a rule in game development that you should take your time estimate and double it. I took two weeks off from working on the game starting on May 11th to build a checklist app for use in my new day job as hospital janitor. Getting a roof for my family takes precedence over building a game for my kid, after all. So all told, the wisdom held true. It took me four weeks to build something that I thought I could do in 2.

As of May 11th, the original intended release date, I had successfully built out the world of the minigame. What I needed to do, which took another two weeks, was populate it with graphics, add a scoring system, and the timer so we could end the game when the time ran out.

Previously, my platformers have been based in tilemaps, a time-honored tradition, especially in pixel art. I’ve got it down to a science.

But to really take advantage of the Sonic-style physics, I decided to try a new style of art, where repeating textures are shown on polygons, with additional repeating textures forming edges for them, and then other decorations.

My initial experiment was too busy. It was too hard to tell the foreground from the background with the detail I put into various tiles.

So I resolved to save the ink for foreground objects and for background objects I specifically wanted to call attention to, and try to make the background a little more like a painting or a watercolor.

There’s also a certain abstractness to it. It’s gamey. But I don’t mind that. I like the checkerboards and random disconnected flowers in Sonic. If Ayqua turns out to be inside the digital world from John Michael Jones Gets a Life, something which is possible, but which I haven’t settled for myself yet, a certain amount of abstractness to it is even ‘realistic’.

However, I did find the polygon/line approach to art very cumbersome, so I may return to tiles in future games. In fact, I will almost certainly use tiles to create the levels in Ayqua Zero, if only to measure the relative merits of the two art techniques in this HD art style.

Which brings me to the things I have learned for the next game.

• From the moment the world was finished, I knew I wanted to tweak the physics. Maybe give the beetle more air time.
• The knife was small so that I could introduce more strategic combat, with enemies blocking certain parts, like in Zelda II. However, this kind of combat precision is cumbersome and runs counter to the “surfing the world” goal. Further, Hollow Knight and Shovel Knight both prove that simply distinguishing horizontal attacks from vertical gets all the benefit of Zelda II’s combat precision, without the aggravation. So it will probably be replaced in the next game with a sword that has a much larger damage area.
• There is an error somewhere in the jump code. In theory, if you are on a wall or ceiling and you press jump, you should shoot off the wall or ceiling at a vector equivalent to “up” for the beetle (e.g. down when on the ceiling). But, in fact, the burst of momentum you get is just regular up for the game world. This problem was minor in terms of the target practice game, so I didn’t bother to try and fix it. But I do need to make it go away reasonably soon.
• The knife attacks push the hero back. This is useful for pogo-ing off of enemies, but the way it damages momentum in general feels like a buzzkill. As does the fact that you slow down a bit while you attack when running. I think I need to add a separate dash attack of some sort.
• I also felt the air control didn’t lend to the feeling of surfing the world. While a double jump or air dash would fix that, these are things that would make excellent powerups in an adventure game, so I am leery of introducing them to the beetle’s basic move set. However, I need to find a solution to this, even if it means starting the player with a double-jump.
• The run button feels superfluous to most players. I like the finer grained control it gives me over the beetle’s momentum, but I rather see the point: Metroid Fusion and Metroid Zero were able to eliminate Super Metroid’s run button without harm to the feel of the physics. I may, after all, go and do likewise.

That’s my notes for now. So what are my plans for the future?

• The next game, Ayqua Zero, should be very small, but have the rudiments of an adventure game. A little story. NPCs you can talk to. Powerups to collect. Something set in a very tight local that takes maybe twenty minutes to an hour to explore.
• When I explore mechanics and build them out, I am very careful to keep things tidy and well-organized. When I aim to release a game, that goes out the window on purpose. Any friction is a potential deadly threat to the finish line. So it is necessary for me to go through everything I made for Ayqua Minus One and clean it up before buckle down on the next game.
• It feels like I could pull together something in a month or so, so I will aim for an August 11 release.
• Today, though, I’m going to make some changes to the beetle sprite that I’ve been avoiding in the interest of getting the game out the door.