Wagenflitzer

Description

Wagenflitzer is a Jump-and-run Metroidvania in which you collect shopping carts to return to your workplace and make moral decisions.

Story

You are a sloth working for a supermarket. Your boss, a greedy magpie, forces you to collect the shopping carts around the parking lot and nearby city. You reluctantly agree, however you soon realize that some people keep the carts because they are having bad times and need them desperately. Do you take back all the carts to make your boss happy or do you let the people keep them and risk your job?

Gameplay and Features

At it's core the game is a simple jump-and-run Metroidvania with a big interconnected level. In the level there are moving enemies that hurt the player on touch. There are also lonely carts ready to collect which on pickup increase the players cart score and follow the player character around. Additionally, there are many NPCs that the player can talk with a simple dialogue mechanic to and then and decide whether or not to take their cart. Taking a cart increases your cart score, not taking a cart increases your empathy score instead. When the player returns to his starting location the game finishes and displays the players score consisting of the cart and empathy score.

Workflow

We started by brainstorming ideas. The theme was "Idols" and the gamejam itself also was about empathy, hence the name "Gamepathy". When we thought about idols, we did not just want to use stars or anything. We instead wanted to highlight little things in day to day life that make people idols and show empathy. Thats how we landed on the shopping cart and dialogue ideas. For the shopping cart idea, it made sense to collect them and return them and as our artists wanted to work in 2D, we made a 2D game.

As for work distribution, we had two artist that created all of the art, one less-experienced programmer and me. As I was more experienced in developing games, I decided that we would work in Unity, set up the project and git repository, and kept track of everything technical during the development. To work more efficiently and prevent merge conflicts in Git, I did all of the game logic and gameplay programming, while our other developer built the level and finetuned the game design and movement values.

Key takeaways

As to be expected in a gamejam, we did not manage to finish everything in the way that we wanted. Nevertheless, I am still very happy with our work and the way that it turned out. We made a fun game with interesting mechanics, managed to connect the gameplay to the theme very well and rounded out the experience very well with full menus and even a small settings page.

Improvements

As normal we were missing a bit of polish and some small assets but other than that there is not really much left. Maybe we could have made the different score types matter more or made the movement a bit snappier or more complex.