A Ruin Jam Game by: Polly Dawn & John Thyer
Nero, The Genderfluid Social Justice Pirate by: Inurashii
Uses Music From: Super Cyborg, Jill of the Jungle, and E-SWAT: City Under Siege

Polly's Notes:
My first collaboration with John! AND my first game jam! All in one title!

This one ended up being a lot chunkier than I think either of us thought it would be. It was for Ruin Jam, a game jam set smack in the middle of the GamerGate nonsense that was going on at the time with a focus on "ruining videogames" by including women, queerness, people of color. Ya know, all the completely normal things weirdo Gamers™ have a problem with. The character, Nero the Genderfluid Social Justice Pirate was a character sprite provided by the jam's host and it gave us adequate reason to dive into a searchy platformer!

Most everything up to this point in my gamedev journey was learning the program to make it do what I want, and with a good bit of that under my belt, I spent a lot more time during this project being able to suss out game feel (we spent *SO LONG* on Nero's jump gravity and speed) and building a big (to me at the time) world to explore. John also came up with the very simple, but amazingly smooth camera movement this game uses and I still wanna yoink all these variables and camera to do something with a little more teeth someday.

A lot of the map design for my part was just throwing down solid walls, floors, and ceilings and seeing what it felt like to move through them. I didn't really plan many of the cool moments I think this little world has (though John did come up with a few intentionally!) they just kinda happened by throwing things at the wall to see what stuck.

Once the world was built with all placeholder solids, the time then came to create the actual tileset to give the world a look.

If you don't know, most of my projects end up built on a parent solid object that looks like the sprite above and then I either associate a sprite to the object later or tile over it with a tileset the way we did this game. Other children objects can be created later that share some of the parent's traits to make things easier. Make use of parenting early in your time with GameMaker. It can save you a lot of time!

Anyway, back on topic! I tilemapped nearly the entirety of our world over the course of about four hours in one evening and it is *JUST* as tedious as it sounds. I believe it was at this point that I passed the game to John for the finishing touches to get the game across the finish line.

The collectible...*ahem* excuse me...KISSABLE boys were actually just very quick and dirty recolors and simple redraws of some sprites from Phantasy Star IV's Palma area. I remember knocking these out in about 20-30 minutes very near the end of the game's development.

My final point of interest is that I insisted on the game having a UI that was completely non-functional and useless (beyond the boy count) because it was funny to me that our game really had no hazards.

Another fun tidbit that keener eyes may have picked up on over the years is that I basically stole the design for the logo from two different NES Contra logos. The K.A.T.B. portion of the logo is modeled on Super C's font coloring and the Operation's design is taken from Contra Force's logo.

John actually had to turn this game in/launch it for us because I spilled water on my modem the evening we were set to go live and my internet was out for the entire weekend!


John Notes:
I felt like such a programming genius when I figured out the K.A.T.B. camera code. I had thirty-ish lines of weird kludgy code that almost, but didn't quite, work. I knew it didn't feel right, and Polly knew it. Then I figured out the same two lines of code a million other devs have figured out, and it worked perfectly. Feels so good.

I like this one! The pacing of the world design feels nice, it's always snappy and fun for me on replays. Love it when a goofy jam conceit turns into something enjoyable.

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