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​I teamed up with Kwis for this one, whom I've worked with on previous jams. We decided to go for higher resolution art for this again as we'd done this on our previous game (Frippy Can't Drive) and had good reactions. We spent a few hours trying to come up with an idea and eventually settled on 'travelling on a cloud'. We then spent a further 4 hours arguing (as you do in jams!) about whether to do a side scroller or a 3/4 top down, but eventually settled on the 3/4 top down perspective. Had a quick sleep, then got up to start.

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Mechanics wise this was an interesting game to create. We needed solid clouds to stand on, that you can anchor your own cloud to, but they also needed to be able to change in size. We solved this by building our clouds out of lots of tiny cloud sections. These sections were then all grouped together to create one collision mask, allowing us to shrink/grow the cloud whenever we liked. This sounds fairly simple now, but it took quite a lot of time to perfect, especially with the resource clouds that you can anchor to. When digging these clouds, we needed to move the player as the cloud shrinks to stop the player falling to their death as they gather the resource. We also needed to move the resource cloud closer to the main cloud as it shrunk so that we didn't strand the player on the very cloud they're digging up. This was solved by comparing the masks of the resource cloud and main cloud, and shifting the resource cloud into the main cloud as it shrinks, and also gravitating the player towards the resource clouds origin point when it shrinks until there is a valid cloud surface beneath. We could have just let the player fall off as it shrinks, but decided that would be more annoying than anything else.

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Another challenge for the clouds was the movement. The player moves the cloud by walking into an edge and 'pushing'. This is all automatic, and not too difficult to implement in theory. But our clouds change in size! Luckily after the previous work on managing the changing sizes, this actually worked fairly flawlessly without much extra development time.

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The pirates were added as a way to add some challenge, otherwise it was just a very simple resource gathering game. The pirates will move their cloud towards you if you're within visible range, otherwise they will ignore you. Meaning the player can try to avoid the pirates if they want, or fight them. Shooting your pistol uses up cloud matter so you have to be careful. Knocking the pirates off their cloud will kill them, but the pirates can also knock you off your cloud, which will cost you all your held cloud matter.

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The asteroids were the last addition to the game. These fly across the screen causing damage to any cloud they hit. They also cause large knockback if they hit the player or a pirate, so it's a good idea to avoid them! You can shoot them with your pistol to deflect them away - but the larger the asteroid, the more hits it needs to be moved.

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We added highscores (how long you survived on your cloud) as they are always a good way to drive competition between players. And with that - game complete!

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Afterthoughts                                                                                                                                                                                                                            

I've always known to not underestimate how long things will take, but this game was a great example of how much you can underestimate something. The cloud collisions (with the growing/shrinking/moving) took me almost half a day to get right, if a little bit longer. I'd originally only planned for that to take an hour or so. It's just collisions right? Famous last words. Luckily the rest of the game was fairly manageable scope wise, however if that hadn't been the case I think we'd have been left having to cut some content out to make sure we reached the submission deadline.