SpellShift
SpellShift is a top-down 2D alchemy game, developed for Geta Game Jam 6, held in January 2019. The player has to combine different elements to use spells and clear the dungeons. Different enemies are affected by different types of spells, and with limited spell slots, it becomes a game of preparedness as well!
The game was built using the Unity3D engine and written in C#. I worked in a team of three on this, as a gameplay programmer and level designer. I designed the air level, and worked on programming the core alchemy system. We tried to implement audio but it was very last minute and we unfortunately didn’t have time to polish it, so the game was published without audio.
The game can be found at geist-191.itch.io/spellshift, and here’s a gameplay sample:
Following are some of my thoughts on the overall experience of developing the app. If you prefer to not read the rest of the post, you can go back to the portfolio home by clicking here.
Background
I teamed up with 2 of my friends to work on this game. We all studied in the same program, so we wanted to make a game together. With all 3 of us being mainly programmers, we all took up programming different portions of the game, with me working on the core functionalities as the other two focused on art and particle effects.
Development Process
I had always wanted to make a game based on elements, and I still would create an infinite number of games relating to that theme. So when we found out the theme for the jam was alchemy, I proposed this idea, and the other two agreed. We decided to make a simple dungeon crawler as that would allow us to focus more on the “alchemy” part of the game rather than spending a significant chunk of the three days we had working on something else.
The idea for combining elements and making elemental enemies isn’t the most original, but it still seemed like a fun game, so we went with it. We decided to have four elemental levels based on our four base elements: fire, water, air and earth. Each of us decided to take up the level design for one elemental level, with the fourth being a collaborative design.
In the end, the game turned out well, and I was happy that we could implement the alchemy system to the extent that we had planned to.
Final Thoughts. What did I learn?
As with Robo Chase, I was working with one of my teammates for the first time. I had to learn to adapt to their speed and the way they prefer to work. In an environment like that, where there is no formal team hierarchy, everyone has a role that they take up unknowingly. For me, it often involved compromising to add functionality others wanted, whether I liked it or not. Unfortunately, I was not satisfied with some parts of the final game. But I’ve since learnt that saying my part is also crucial for any group work and made a mental note to compromise less in the future.
Our decision to leave the audio out of the game was good. The absence of audio does impact the overall gameplay experience. Still, I feel like having “bad” audio, which would perhaps distract players from the other elements of the game, would have been worse than having no audio at all.