Lost in the Frost - Development

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The Jam

Lost in the Frost was developed for Mini Jam 42: Snow. The jam took place from November 28th 2019 at 10:00 PM to December 1st 2019 at 10:00 PM and ended with 29 game entries. I was the Runner-up in the jam which I consider to be a great honor. My competitors were great developers and I'm happy to have participated with such talented people. You can check-out the other games at Itch.io.

The game had to be "Snow" Themed and the collectively voted limitation was "Your game must only use 2 colors. Your game must only ever show two color values. Alpha channels are not allowed. The colors must be 100% solid. Check out Return of the Obra Dinn or Gato Roboto for reference, If you like. Feel free to ask in the community section or on our Discord if you have any questions."

Rules were as follows:

  • You may only make your game within the time frame, we do check. However, updates are allowed after the game has been submitted

  • No harassment of any kind.

  • Keep game content clean. No nsfw content, offensive content, excessive gore/violence.

  • You can use pre-made assets that were not made for this jam, like asset packs, or assets from older projects of yours.

  • Follow the limitations given.

  • Read the rules. Not reading the rules is not an excuse for breaking them.

Development

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I used this game as an opportunity to make all the assets I used during the Jam myself. I used unity as the engine with an engine extension called Corgi Engine that is designed to make Platformers. This engine is produced by Renaud Forestié of More Mountains. It is a fantastic base for a 2D or 2.5D Platformer. I got to spend most of my development time making assets and adjusting game feel. I owe that to the hard work of Renaud.

Art

I made the art for the game using a great application called Marmoset Hexels 3 (I will refer to it as Hexels). Hexels is a hexel or pixel based art program. This use case was pixel oriented but, the hexel system is an interesting way to make art. Hexels also has a great animation suite, animation in Hexels is frame-based and pretty bare-bones, so I jazzed up the animation with some in unity particle effects for the gun and bullets. It was a challenge to insure no alpha was applied to the effects because Unity changes alphas by default in a lot of the particle tools. One of my more elegant solutions for my two color pallet was the aim reticle that you can see over any surface check-out the video below.

Problems

The main unforeseen problem I ran into was with the performance of the game. I had been running it on my high powered PC, before publishing I decided to test it on some other systems. It was a pretty inefficient game, it was having a hard time chugging along on older or low power systems. With little time to rectify the problem I developed a check-point system that de-spawned and spawned enemies to reduce the number of processes running. It worked pretty well but meant a slight delay when reaching a check-point. If I ever update the game I will make a new system that doesn't have to load at these check points.