Antarctic Glitch postmortem

This Ludum Dare (#LD27) was really crazy for us. This was our first competition as an independent game studio (yeah, Beavl!) and we decided to team up with awesome artist Fernando Martínez Ruppel (you can check his work here). After some crazy brainstorming on Friday when theme was revealed, we came up with a really simple idea (but ambitious in scope for a game made in 72 hours!).

Note: you can play Antarctic Glitch clicking on this awesome poster!




The idea
Basically, our idea was to change the playable character every 10 seconds. In order to make it work (and also be relevant!), we will be designing five (!) different versions of our lead character.

Genre
We want to make a brawler (yeah, beat'em up). But do to timeframe constraints, we thought about an 'infinite brawler' variation with a highscore scheme (we used Dreamlo, you should check it!).

Control scheme
We made it really simple. Left + Right + Up + Z + X (two different actions for each character).

The story
With these rules set, we started working on the story. We are all sci-fi and fantasy fans, so we decided to build a background story around all this 'every 10 seconds the playable character changes' principle. We worked with different concepts such as glitches, paralell worlds and quantum mechanics. And Antarctica. Antarctica is an awesome place in the world, so why not? We called our game Antarctic Glitch.

Note: These following images are from the game intro. You should check it out!


 
Character design
So, we worked on our lead character, a bearded doc. This doc would have five different versions from five parallel worlds: a mecha, a beast, a superhero, a steampunk doc and a battle dwarf.


 
Animations
After deciding on all the different docs and on every action for each one (remember, we would use a two-action model), we started working on the animations (action one, action two, damage, jump, walk, standby). Lots of work ahead!


 


The enemies
Two types. Land and flying enemies.




Antarctica
South Magnetic Pole. Land of mysteries. Antarctica is awesome. And for an infinite brawler, we made a nice Antarctic background that loops.



Sound FX and music
While working on our #7dfps entry, we came across with some great sound FX made by @Jordinewcastle & @Fin_Send. We used some of them. Music was composed by Ruppel. We love the glitchy feeling of it!

Unity
Unity is our best friend. This was our first 2D game with this framework and all went really smooth.

What went wrong
We are really pleased with all the work we have done, but we were really ambitious for a tree-day project and some things went wrong (it always happens!). All of the following needs some polish:
- Visual feedback when shooting.
- Some sound FX are out of sync.
- Balancing the gameplay (there is one exploit to be found, and if you find it, you can top our ranking!).

What lies ahead
We love our character and the complex universe we created. So we are thinking on developing the game a little further (mobile version anyone?) and who knows, making a comic maybe. What do you think? Would you like to read it? (Let us know in the comments section, please!)
Cheers!




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