GMTKJam 2021 was my first game jam and my first ever finished game.  I've spent the year following participating in five other jams and trying to use each as an opportunity to progress.  I thought making a sequel to Kit-Twins would be an interesting way to give myself a test that could be a kind of self check to see how far I've progressed in that time.

THEME ANNOUNCEMENT

When I saw the announcement video that declared the theme "Roll of the Dice" my initial thought was that I hated the theme.  I knew I would be making a sequel of Kit-Twins 1 and intended to keep the mirrored movement mechanic intact and that I was gonna try to implement it with whatever the theme was.  In under two minutes I had the idea of having multiple different kit-twin types with different  movement abilities that were determined by a roll of the dice at each checkpoint area.  I tried to think past that and come up with something else because usually your first idea in a game jam is not that creative and often there ends up being tons of other games with similar mechanics.

Immediately following this I called two friends and my brother to see if they had any cool ideas off of the theme.  All three had rough ideas that were fairly similar.  This further cemented in my mind that something more interesting could be done with the theme.   I thought about the theme for close to an hour after that and came up with nothing of substance and decided to just build the game based off of the initial idea :(

DEVELOPMENT

I'd never done RNG before but a quick google search revealed that it's extremely easy to do in unity with just one line of code.   After I got the RNG working I looked for some pixel art dice and realized there was only one on itch and assumed we would see it in over 50% of entries but it didn't end up being that prolific.  

After getting the RNG set up with the Dice-Roll I got it instantiating a random between 3 pefabs that all had the character animations and controller.  I mildly modified the script for the twins but they all started with my player controller script. Aside from adding a little code to give the green twin a double jump the difference in the different twin types movement just came from tweaking some public variables such as jump height, speed, mass, etc.  Also having the cat animation be white made it really easy for me to recolor them by changing the color on the sprite renderer instead of going through the annoying process of recoloring the sprite-sheets in Aseprite and then reimporting all the animations.  I actually was very surprised at myself by how quickly I was able to throw this together.  

ART 

I'm not really much of an artist, plus I am completely unable to comprehend how any human could possibly have the time make art from scratch and develop a game in the time frame of a game jam (some of y'all are crazy talented), so on all of my projects I have been using art assets I've found on itch.  Rarely (and not even once in my case) is it possible to find all of the same assets you need from the same artist so if you are using itch assets you are kind of forced to mash-up a combination of assets from different artists and this typically leads to a pretty inconsistent look.  I've adopted the practice in my last 3 jams of snagging a color palette from lospec and putting all my assets in Aseprite and applying the palette to all assets.  About 25% of the time you can just import the palette and change the color mode to indexed and get good results, but normally you have to individually change the colors to get a good look.  This can be pretty tedious but 100% worth the effort in my opinion.  To combat the tediousness I try to avoid assets with a color count higher than around 7 or 8.  I've been pretty happy with the results and think this game in particular is my most visually appealing.  Also I've more and more taken to actually mixing assets together to create new ones.  There are a couple of instances of that in this game but the best example of that would be that cat statue that serves as the checkpoint/Kit-Twin spawner.  This is actually a mash-up of three different assets.  The base was a Mayan looking statue that came from the same asset pack as the house.  I cut off the statue and just kept the base.  I then recolored the cat animations to be the same stone color as the base.  And for a little additional visual appeal and game juice I took the flame animation off of the top of a torch and added it to the two fire holder areas (at least that's what they looked like, not sure on the original artists intent) when the statue is activated.

A very common critique I get in a lot of my games is that the background is plain or there isn't enough visually going on.  One of my best games as far as mechanics and fun gameplay got absolutely crushed by this because I ran out of time and had no background and very little stage decoration.  I've played around with parallax before and got it working in some prototypes, but this is the first time I've put it in a jam and I think it was totally worth it and added a lot of visual appeal to the game.  I ended up using different artists for the two layers but I think with the new palette on both they go together fairly well.  I fortunately ended up with a lot of time for polish on this one and was able to spend a decent amount of time on stage decorations too.  I got a sci-fi tileset from Penusbmic and recolored it.  This was actually the hardest one to get over to the new palette as originally it was kind of a fall color palette and all of the foliage had autumn colors.  Of all the assets I think this one mismatches most with the ground tile-set, but not too bad.  A game made with mixed assets can never look as good and cohesive as one where all the art was created to be utilized together, but I think I am consistently improving my ability to "sample" different artists and make them work together somewhat well.  I have gotten at least some negative feedback about inconsistent art on every jam I've done but If I recall correctly I only got one comment on it for this jam so I'm gonna take that as a win.  Also I did actually create one piece of art for this game!  The particles that shoot out of Robot Boi® when he explodes are an Omniclause original haha.

AUDIO

Although I am a musician, I rarely have the time to create the music for my games.  So far I've only made the main theme of the game once for a jam (and actually got a lot of really positive feedback!) and I only was able to pull that off because it was a 14 day jam.  I have lately started making a little intro cadence for my games and continued that practice for this one.  I used some mellotron sound-fonts and was able to put it together pretty quickly.  For the main themes of my games I try to go with music that isn't typical for a video game.  You aren't likely to ever find chip-tunes in any of my games.  For this jam I wanted to do lofi hip-hop with a "tropical" feel.  I started by searching for royalty free tropical lofi on youtube.  I found several tracks I liked but they were all like only a couple of minutes long and I figured such a short song on loop would become annoying for the player.  After spending more time than I could afford trying to find a longer track I ended up just picking the four short ones I liked best and threw them in Ableton to make a little medley.  Between each song I put a little nature ambience instead of just going right into the next song.  I think I made these sections a bit long and it confused a couple of the players.  The opinion on the choice of music seemed pretty evenly split.  I had some comments that say they loved it and it set the vibe of the game well, while others said it didn't fit and that it was distracting.  I think overall I probably could've brought the audio level down and definitely need to figure out volume faders on my pause canvas for future jams.  I have been putting that one off for way too long.  For the credits I used an excerpt from Masayoshi Takanaka's Brasilian Skies and I think it fit nicely as a follow-up to the lofi medley. 

Sound design has slowly been becoming one my favorite aspects of game design and I usually end all of my jam days by kind of rewarding myself by working on sound design.  It feels like a nice break from coding and I really enjoy the whole process.  I have been using Freesound.org for all of my effects and then editing, combining, and manipulating them in Ableton.  I was particularly pleased with Robot Boi's voice.  I ended up combining and chopping up 3 different freesound clips to make it.

THE BAD

Overwhelmingly the biggest critiques on the game were slipperiness of the player, and the hit boxes on the spikes being too large.  I think I fell into the classic trope of getting too good at my own game and had my blinders on on these issues.  I intentionally attempted to make this game far easier than Kit-Twins I and my main goal was to get as many players as possible to roll credits.  I was aiming for a first time player to be able to complete the game in 10-15 minutes.  I think I overshot that slightly but it does appear that I had a decent amount of players finish the game.  It sucks to know I could have fixed the slipperiness on the player just by changing a number on a public variable, and changed the hit-box size in about thirty seconds, but this will be something at the front of my mind when I am tweaking the character controller for my next game. Something that I didn't get too much negative feedback on but personally think could of used a little more work was the movement of different Kit-Twin types.  I threw them together fairly quickly and started level design right away.  Having to have each challenge be beatable by all three was a huge pain in the ass.  Once I got halfway through level design it made it impossible to tweak their movement unless I wanted to go back and retest and tweak all the challenges.  Also I was a little bummed at an overall score of #789.  I really shouldn't complain and it's not that bad of a score considering I'm only a year in developing games, but I for some reason was expecting it to perform a little bit better.

THE GOOD

My main takeaway from this is that it I have learned a good amount in the last year and Kit-Twins II is a significantly better game than the original in just about every way.  Although I was initially upset with my score I really should take it as a win and I do.  Kit-Twins I scored #1408 out of 5717 games, and this entry got #789 out of 6157 entries so it did perform significantly better.  I initially didn't know if doing a sequel would be a good idea because it might not come off as very creative to use an already established main mechanic, but I do think I ended up using the theme as the main mechanic of the game in a way that significantly impacted gameplay and don't see the way I implemented it as a cop-out.  Also it was really fun to kind of treat my shitty little jam game as something special that deserved a sequel and build up on that little world and add a little more lore to it.  The names Kinten and Robot Boi are pretty weak and kind of cringy, but hey now they are cannon and are staying in.  I had an absolute blast making this game and it served perfectly as the self test it was meant to be.  I initially planned on doing a sequel as a one time thing, but after the experience I had making this one I absolutely plan on doing a Kit-Twins III.  This postmortem is more of journal for me than anything and I don't really expect anyone to ever read it, but if you are a developer and find yourself reading this I would urge you to consider making a sequel to one of your game jams!  It was a really good experience for me.

KIT-TWINS III COMING IN 2023!