Created by: Polly
Background Art by Sayara-T

I wanna start out this piece by saying that I think SynchroDASH is awesome. I get real giddy when I load this thing up and play it. I think it's so full of zazz and feels real good to play. I'm really happy with how the vision is very clear, and the presentation and snappiness of the whole thing feels nice and slick to me.

So, why didn't you finish it, Polly, I can already hear only the voices in my head asking? It took me a real long time to finally answer why, despite the fact that I started this game with inspiration firing on all cylinders, the spark for creating new stages and finishing the game proper just kinda fizzled.

It's not the first time I've stalled out and had a game's development fragmented over long periods of time. Both Afterward and Polly Dungeon hit similar lulls in development, but those ultimately made it to the finish line. SynchroDASH's case is different, though.

While I was working on this game, I finished a number of smaller projects over the two year span of time I considered this game's development "active." I think what I found is that my gamedev voice just kind of evolved. Games like Planet Attrition, Youmu-Youmu Ball, and Tessa's RPG Nightmare are all games that were much smaller in scope, less ambitious, and weren't iterating on something I'd already done. They were exciting, they were fast, and they were letting me create in new ways I hadn't before.

The more I came back to work on SynchroDASH, despite the fact that it is quite different from SynchroniZ, the more I felt like I was treading old ground. I didn't hate working on it, but as time went on, it felt like it was somehow stuck in the past. I think a part of me also felt like I was maybe trying to "redeem" SynchroniZ in some way by making that game's concept simpler, but still mind-bendy in a cool new way. It just didn't excite me as much any more, and I spent the last year really mulling over letting it go, and asking myself if this was a failure if I did so.

It took a pretty meaty conversation with John to finally give myself permission to let this one go and not feel like I failed. Not finishing SynchroDASH didn't completely creatively stall me out at all. I feel like I've released some of my best games since I started working on this one. On top of that, I've reused a lot of the things I learned game-design wise while making this game and have mined it for a *lot* of code for my other projects.

So, despite not being complete, SynchroDASH isn't in any way a failure, because I still learned a lot in getting it as far as I did. And that's why I think it deserves a place here among all the actually completed works. As creatives, I think it's okay if we outgrow ideas, because they still feed things that come after. So, I hope you enjoy this little slice of a cool game that I'm happy I worked on.

Now...Let's actually talk about the damn thing!

SynchroDASH's premise hit me probably about halfway through developing SynchroniZ, so I tucked all the things I wanted to do in a prospective sequel into a text file. Everything that's in the full unfinished demo is pretty much implemented exactly as they appeared in my notes.

I got the prototype for this game going in relatively short order once I sat down and started working. It's very basic with no zazz at all, but the overall idea immediately felt solid, and the folks I let try it out thought it was fun!

As for the actual notes, these are the things I wanted to accomplish with the game's overall design:

1. One player object that can switch between red and blue.
Obviously SynchroniZ's biggest hurdle was controlling two objects at once, so to simplify things I just gave the player the ability to change colors at will.

ASDF 2 would ultimately be where this idea would land.

2. Increase player speed and the player can never stop moving entirely.
I wanted this game to be much faster and I wanted to force the player to have to manage their movement more. The player has a dash speed when a direction is held down, and when they've let go of a direction, their movement persists in accordance with whatever the last direction input was, however at a much slower speed.

Having the player manage their speed would eventually get exapnded on a bit more in Planet Attrition: Hive Assault later down the line, though that game's movement is quite a bit more nuanced.

3. Stages need to be more dynamic.
Making Smiley Boys spawn in waves rather than all of them being on the field from the outset means the player has to be ready to switch gears and move toward a new area of the stage once they've completed the wave.

Color Gates were also added to assist in making things more dynamic, since the gates themselves can also change color, altering how you have to handle each section of a stage.

The nightmare that is Stage 10 in this demo is probably the most extreme version of this idea (and this stage would likely have been moved to much later in the game once I started designing more.)

4. Some late-game crazy stuff.
The only thing not really represented in this demo (though, I did build one unfinished stage with this gimmick) was screen wrapping, meaning your player object would go off the screen on one side and end up on the other.

Below is what I'd planned to be the final stage layout before what would be followed by the game's final boss sequence.

Once the groundwork was laid with the draft version, I started building the game proper. Since the game had a focus on speed, I wanted to speed up time between each successive try at a stage or starting a new stage, which was how I settled on the new no-transition death animation. This thing looks so cool and I'm so damn proud of how it turned out that I'm almost sad the game's not being finished just for this explosion and simple particle effect alone. The next thing from the draft that needed addressing was that the next wave of Smiley Boys just appearing without any kind of warning once you'd finished the current wave felt a little stilted, so I added Eepy Boys to the mix so that the player would always know where the next wave was going to spawn.

One issue raised by my testers early was that Color Gates shifting colors should probably be telegraphed a little more, rather than just happening upon loading a new wave. I never really settled on a good way of telegraphing the change one wave beforehand, and I'm still not sure how I'd have handled it, so I do think the Gate shifts can feel a little abrupt and unfair if you're not prepared for or haven't already seen them happen.

After that, it was just a matter of making fun stage designs and creating fun and challenging paths back and forth through them. I was going to do 25 normal stages and a final boss, much like SynchroniZ, so this one was still gonna be a bit of a chonker of a game.

I kinda wanted each stage to last just a smiiiidge longer than the player felt they should be, just to push their endurance a bit. I imagine that during testing or final cleanup that some of these stages may have ended up having a wave or two omitted to speed things up a bit, but at the time of creation, I liked the feeling that each stage was kinda pushing the envelope a bit in terms of length.

The last thing planned for the game that had no real work done on it besides some design notes was the final boss, which was going to be a throwback to an old site gag from 2009. The Socks Mart Bowtie Guy!

No real pattern for the fight had been planned yet, but my notes mention that he would attack with his hands, hat, and bowtie, dash at the player, and that in order to hit him, the player would have to navigate small mazes and hit switches to force him to change color to red or blue.

And that's really kinda all there is to this one. There is a part of me that is bummed I didn't get this one finished, but as mentioned earlier, I don't think that's a feeling that's going to stick around or hinder my ability to create. I have two active projects in the works this very minute and one I haven't even prototyped yet, so despite SynchroDASH not quite making it to the finish line, I don't think I have anything to really feel bad about here.

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