"We at Reset Co. pride ourselves in resetting your home to a clean and tidy state, no matter the damage!"Nuke, the mischievous cat, is causing chaos in a client's house! Play as Carla, a proud Reset Co. employee, and use her reset power to put things back in order.
I've worked on this game along with koikidd (formelly Strasteo here on the forums). I'll use this thread to talk a bit about the development process, and also invite your feedback here as well. I'm writting this from memory, so it might not be as descriptive as one would like.
Used Resourceshttps://luyren.itch.io/luyrens-utility-packUsed the
Follow Point behavior to make AI movement, and the
Scene Actor Spawner for the smoke effects on the introduction of each stage. Also used the
Orbit behavior for the stage complete stars movement.
https://luyren.itch.io/luyrens-miscellaneous-stencyl-behaviorsUsed the
Time Count behavior for the stage timers,
Particles for the stage complete effect and
Player Control for player and AI movement.
I used
musescore to compose the music,
bfxr for one or two sound effects. I recorded some sounds in my house and edited them with
audacity for the majority of the others sound effects. Graphics were 99% done by koikidd, I mostly stuck with some recolors.
ConceptDuring brainstorming, each of us had different ideas:
1- I thought about a simple platformer, get-to-the-goal style, in which you must reach a target time or the stage fails. The concept here is the speedrun reset, so you'd be resetting for the perfect run.
2- koikidd thought about a concept in which you have status conditions, you can reset to a previous status, and the interaction between the player, their current status and objects on the stage would be used to reach a complete stage.
We went with the second idea as the core concept, followed by the idea of resetting a room manually. That concept is fully fledged and included in the game. Objects could be wet, on fire, shocked or dry. Interacting with an object would transfer the status. For example if you are on fire and touch a wet table, the table would get dry. You'd need to set each object to their position and target status to complete a stage.
Story-wise, a custodian job seemed fitting. I have a soft spot for the magical/super natural being treated as everyday stuff, like in some Ghibli movies. koikidd came up with the idea of a cat causing all the mess. We were working on a game previously about a cat that catches flying fishes, but we cancelled it, so that cat lives on here.
DevelopmentOn the first days, I focused mainly on the basic actions (picking up stuff and push/pull), the flow of the game (start a stage, stage select and the gameplay loop) and later took 2 days for the soundtrack. We also though about some more stage elements, such as generators to power up moving platforms, and a lamp for dark stages, the latter being in the game code but left unused.
One thing I wanted to make sure was to show the player all the objectives. That's why the intro cutscene plays in all stages: it grabs the screen image at that moment, which can be then viewed on the pause menu, along with a text showing the objectives, to know where exactly to put everything. koikidd made the acctual indicators on each stage, and they also ended up helping a lot, both as guides for the player, and when making the intro and gameplay versions of each stage.
I think by the third or fourth day we noticed that we weren't comming up with ideas for puzzles with the reset status mechanic. So koikidd came up with the concept of resetting the entire room, and objects on their target positions wouldn't be reset. End result is that the entire status thing is included in the game, but left barely used. We also settled on single-screen puzzles.
After that we started designing the stages. We pretty much did half of the levels each, and we did a last rush on sunday to get the game done. I admittedly had some troubles comming up with stages that better used the "reset objects" mechanic. Had we started designing stages earlier with that idea in mind, we'd probably had a better grasp of how to properly utilize it, and we'd probably have more stages as well.
One thing to add: I personally spent all days of the jam from around 10-11am to midnight working on it, with a few breaks along each day, and 2 or 3 days I started at around 5pm. I don't have a job at the moment, nor other obligations, so I was able to put a lot of time into it.
Community BonusI did a simplified cutscene system for this game jam, which is used for the intros and start/end stage sequences. I'll document it later this week, and add it as a "free demo" of sorts that you'll be able to download in my cutscene pack page. It's way more limited than my cutscene pack, and its setup is similar but not quite the same, but might be useful for simple cutscenes for your games. Plus, if future jams also have the same rules for pre-made resources, you'll be able to use it.
That's it from me. Comments and feedback are welcome!
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