I learned a ton from this one... 😵

It is done 😌

In classic Jam entry fashion, I'd have tweaked a bunch more stuff had I the time, but it is what it is, and I'm still pretty pleased with that 👍

(Had I not had to scoot to work on the night of the jam deadline, I'd have had a whole extra four hours for said tweaking... 😣)

Once again, I saw this as another opportunity to experiment with the mighty GB Studio and both build off a bunch of ideas I'd previously dabbled with as well as test out some new stuff.

Both GHOST NIRVANA SSS: Super salt splash and RUNAWAYS use variations on the twin-stick shooter input I'd first tested in an NSFW game I'd made a few months back (Content Advisory: NSFW game is NSFW...), and the Event Stack that enables different shot types in San Taku Shi: Rock Paper Scissors is built up primarily from experiments with getting crouching to work in my Splatterhouse-for-Game-Boy prototype. Other aspects I managed to make a better job of this time around include eliminating those schoolboy errors I'd been making when trying to create a health system with associated HUD display (one of my other NSFW games plus my survival horror vertical slice both screw this up in completely different ways... 😅).

Here's a breakdown of the known issues with each game, and my thoughts in general:

GHOST NIRVANA SSS: Super salt splash:

Theoretically the simplest game in the set, the plan was to make very basic modifications to the old twin-stick event stack, then make some levels, populate them with enemies and consider it all done.

I ended up luring myself into a false sense of security with that line of thought, and by the time I got around to building the game's world, that deadline was pretty close, so corners had to get cut, and oversights were made 😌. I got a lot of the presentational material out of the way first, so I'm very happy with the music, title screen, ending graphic and opening cutscene, however the cutscene marking the transition from real world to computer world was made so late that some of the visual gags I had wanted to include had to get cut (the big ghost on the monitor wasn't even going to be in that scene originally).

As for the levels themselves, as much as I had envisaged the occasional single-screen sequence, I certainly hadn't intended for a string of levels to be like that in succession; I wanted more larger, scrolling levels plus more settings such as a cat-and-mouse-like sequence in a server farm, and the end boss to appear back in the real world.

I also rushed the boss... badly 😬. It's behaviour is literally a copy-and-paste of the regular enemy behaviour, down to the brief cessation of movement whenever the player hits it. This is fine in a scenario where there are other enemies coming at the player, but against the one enemy in the scene this makes the boss unfathomably easy to stunlock...! 🤦‍♂️

RUNAWAYS:

Runaways is highly experimental. Overall (thankfully!) it seems to hold together pretty well, but it certainly contains a bunch of issues:

• Unexpected "wiggle" when moving left or right while firing up with the shotgun (it's something to do with switching from the Animation States "ShootUp3" to "Default" while Player Sprite Sheet is set to "RunPlayerShotgun", in relation with the "overflow in implicit constant conversion" warnings that pop up during the build process).
• During testing, I found that graphics started to break when there were more than two AI with active On Update Scripts, hence the game only having two enemies on screen at the most at any one time.
• Total number of Sprite Tiles exceeds Scene limit, which has the knock-on effect of causing graphical glitching to the Text Box for the Quit Menu (I can live with that... 🤷‍♂️).
• Pulling up the Quit Menu (glitched), then choosing to return to the game had caused in-game Sprites to glitch during testing (I'm a little less okay with that one... 😤 Haven't tested it in the released build, tho... 🤔).
• I would definitely have preferred to include more enemy wave patterns; what we have here is just a taste of where a project like this could go. This being said, the framework exists now, so any future projects I make which use it will have the benefit of this better understanding, plus more time to plan 👍.
• You can actually break the endless loop...! 😅 The fast moving vehicle which winds its way up and down the entire screen marks the last "wave" before the events start over. The third "wave" is the first instance of two enemies being on screen at the same time. If you have the grenade launcher and one-shot the first enemy that appears before the second one does, that second one never shows up, and that second one needs to be defeated in order to trigger the event after that: soft locked!
• Finally, and most crucial of all of course... I may need to tweak that shotgun. I swear it should hit harder than it does. Neat effect, tho.

San Taku Shi: Rock Paper Scissors

I wouldn't have expected RPS, being a relatively simple platform shooter (more simple than what's going on under Runaways hood, in any case), to have much in the way of issues, but the further into development I got, the stranger the glitches became 🤨:

• Given how Background Palettes were set up for this project, there are brief graphical glitches at the Init stage of any related Scene (ultimately me learning some GB Studio best practice for future projects).
• I was trying some Camera Move and alternating Camera Lock To Player > Horizontal Axis/ Horizontal and Vertical Axes stuff so that when the player lands on a new floor as they ascend the building, the ground of the current floor becomes the bottom of the game screen, but I couldn't get it to work (maybe Platformer+ has a solution for this; I really need to look into that one... 🤔).
• Occasionally I've found that when pressing some sequence and/or combination of the Attack button and the Down directional control, when returning directional control to neutral the player sprite becomes that of the Rock Guardian instead of the Paper Guardian (obviously while the Paper Guardian is still available). This is easily fixed by pressing the Attack button again from a neutral position, i.e. a "Paper Shot", restoring the Paper Guardian Sprite in his Attack stance. This is not ideal, but hardly game-breaking.
• I'm not 100% certain, but after taking a hit from one of the "Scissors Walkers", which should have taken out my Paper Guardian, I'm sure I fired a Paper Shot as P.G. on one of my subsequent attacks...
• There was also that one time I only had the one guardian left... The Sprite was of the Scissor Guardian, and he was firing Scissors Shots, but the HUD was telling me I only had the Paper Guardian left. I managed to defeat a Paper Walker - ergo, Scissors Guardian - but when I hit a Scissors Walker I lost the Paper Guardian, thus restarting the stage...
• During the level, the player HUD works as intended: whenever the player loses a guardian, the corresponding icon goes dim. For some reason this doesn't seem to work during the boss encounter.
• The boss was originally going to be a more complex fight: the boss shifts between four states - neutral, rock, paper and scissors - and the idea for defeating it was to hit each RPS state with the shot type that the current state was weak against. Hit each one three times to disable it. Hit all three states three times to defeat the boss outright. In turn, accidentally hitting a state with the shot type it was strong against restored some of the boss's strength. I had a HUD for the boss's state condition, but somehow having this in place prevented the Scene from loading. Removing this HUD element restored functionality, but meant the player would have no visible means of tracking how much damage they had inflicted against which state. I felt this was an unfair ask, so I streamlined the fight by requiring the player to only hit each state once.
• The boss graphics in the released build aren't even the intended graphics - they are my first draft, the placeholders. The reason I'm using them here is because, for reasons I cannot comprehend, when I switched to the intended sprites, the boss would enter its Scissors state when it should have gone to Paper, and vice versa. I didn't have this issue using the placeholders, and the only change I had made were the Sprite Sheets (and yes, I made sure the sprites and palettes corresponded with the correct Animation States. Very mysterious.
• Also sometimes there's a kernel panic...
• Cards on the table, a broader issue with RPS is general unexplored potential. I'd been thinking about light puzzle solving in which the player would need specific Guardians available for specific outcomes, or alternate routes and so forth. Obviously these are not present in the current build.
• And I ended up rushing those roof graphics...!