Initial AQUAMARINE Game Jam Ver. Release!

Hi, and thank you for checking out our game! I'm about a week late to making this post, but we've just released our first game jam project for the Pixel Game Jam 2024 hosted by SanForge Studio. We've fiddled a bit with GameMaker in the past, but hadn't ever worked on a project together to this level of completion. This game jam version of AQUAMARINE features 3 challenging levels and a boss fight at the end, and I personally think that all is pretty good for just 10 days spent developing it.

Looking Back On Development

Alejandro Garcia (Art & Design) 

• "For a first time Game Jam entry, I'm really happy with AQUAMARINE. The game isn't perfect of course, but I learned plenty in the 10 days we spent developing it. For one, this was my first time using GitHub ever, and I've learned how insanely useful having a repository that backs itself up and saves iterations is. I did accidentally tick off our programmer though by forgetting to use branches and committing changes to main periodically though. Sorry Ryan. But anyway, even just the process of working with a team like this was super fun. I tend to have a lot of ideas for gameplay, visuals, and polish, but I usually don't have the programming know-how to achieve the complicated bits myself. So working in tandem with my big boy programmer man to get things done was pretty dope. I supply ideas and visuals, he programs these features in, I juice up the results, and we both test gameplay and look for bugs. The only part of the dev process that was less fun was the final 2 days, but that was kind of due to our own pacing working on the project. I spent those last two days crunching so unbelievably hard, staying up repeatedly till like 4-5AM to finish up stage designs and make sure my sprites were at a good level of quality. But it paid off in the end! ALSO, the pistol shrimp is a real animal that actually exists, if you didn't know that. Our portrayal of this shrimp isn't the most realistic, but the actual animal has the incredible ability to shoot little superheated bubbles out of their enlarged dominant claw. It's super sick, look it up."

Ryan Flynn (Lead Programmer) 

• "I’ve had some coding experience and was looking to apply what I learned to a game. Learned a lot about how games work, especially with Gamemaker. There are many things I learned while working this game, such as how the sprite animations work, and how develop a state machine for different enemies, and the player, to be able to run certain code only when it is in that state. Overall, this was a fun project to work on, and in hindsight, many things are held together with hopes and dreams and duct tape, so I would like to fix those. Also thank you to Shaun Spalding’s tutorials on youtube, he had a video on almost everything I wanted to learn how to do."
  

Potential Future Updates

While we're happy with how this initial version of the game, the team and I would still like to expand on it further into a more complete experience. We've got a couple ideas for more content and gameplay changes, and we've gotten some feedback about what players would like to see in the game. These ideas include:

• Variable jump height (suggested by players- instead of always jumping a fixed height, making the jump height depend on how long the button was held)
• Jump cancelling (the ability to descend straight down quickly from the middle of a jump)
• 8-Directional Aiming (suggested by players- introduce a lock button that allows the player to stand in place and shoot in every direction)
• Other platformer QOL features, such as coyote time or jump buffering for extra responsiveness
• Powerups/modifiers for the player's bubble pistol claw, like superheated bubbles, bubble shotguns, and so on
• Increasing difficulty of Mantis King
• Adding more levels + a world map to navigate them
• More settings options for players to tweak resolution, fullscreen/windowed modes, volumes, etc.
• Checkpoints (suggested by players- save progress in levels to avoid the disappointing feeling of being sent back to the start of a level when you get blasted by a seahorse or something)
• Save File system to allow players to return to their playthrus, especially if we add more levels
• Redesign current enemies and introduce new ones to really flesh out the Mantis King's army
• More hazards and mechanics to make platforming a more pronounced part of the game
• Better level transitions
• More detailed cutscene illustrations
• Replace current soundtrack with something more original (it would be really cool to hire an actual composer for the soundtrack and maybe even an SFX artist to overhaul core gameplay sounds. but that requires funding and we're just broke young adults in the contemporary American economy so that's not gonna happen for a while)

Ultimately these potential updates depend on our placeholder in the jam, so we don't really know what we'll do until the judging period ends. The hosts, SanForge Studio, have stated that the winners of the Beginner's Best category could potentially receive a publishing deal with them, and that'd be the major motivating factor for expanding on AQUAMARINE into a larger game.

Thank you for checking out our game, and taking the time to read this Devlog!