TrampElon - Why & How

My game development history

I've been developing games as a hobby on and off for about twenty years, starting when I was 13 years old. I never managed to finish a single project, probably a problem many (game) developers can recognise. I love programming, so whenever the core problems were solved I ditched the project as it no longer held any interest or was too much work to actually complete. It also didn't help I had zero graphical skills so the 'games' always looked awful. 

Fix the pixels

In line with the rest of my life, I took it upon myself to fix these show-stoppers. First by getting a bit better at basic pixel art; I partook in Inktober and created about 30 small pixel art creations. (See my instagram) Some looked better than others, a few I finished in half an hour and others took six times as long.  I didn't care about the results, just that I finished at least something every day. I got a lot of feedback and some help from fellow pixelartists. Even though I still feel like a newbie I'm quite proud of some of the drawings... Less so of others ;-) But there is progress and I think my pixel skills are now 'good enough' to make something passable. 

Scope, scope, scope

Next was actually finishing a project, so I thought of a basic arcade game, something I was sure I could easily code. I gave myself a soft limit of seven days of programming & art to make sure it stayed small. I got a basic version running quite quickly and kept building upon it. So there it was, my idea: a guy on a trampoline doing tricks and chaining them together kind of like the old Tony Hawk Pro Skating.  In the graphical domain I limited myself to a 128x128 pixel window (upscaled of course) and the same limited color palette I've been using for my Inktober creations.

TrampElon

I wanted to give the game some context, so during a run to the local supermarket my girlfriend and I brainstormed some concepts. After a few minutes of exchanging ideas, Elon Musk as the protagonist trying to reach Mars was a winner.  Using the Joe Rogan interview as the exposition felt like an easy and fun way to give the 'story' a bit more context and seemed like a fun intro.

Technical shit

The game is build with Java and LWJGL (an OpenGL wrapper for Java) so everything is rendered with shaders on the graphics card. I used an engine I still had from my previous two (unfinished) projects of last year. The programming was quite easy and even though it's a small game it still took around 4000 lines of code (excluding the engine which is another 8k LoC) With OpenJDK's new jpackage tool it was relatively easy to package it in native installers & runtimes for Window, Mac & Linux.

In the end

Doing this project was great! The result is almost exactly how I pictured it and I completed it in my set time limit. Wrapping up the project took a bit longer; creating the various installers (I'm currently travelling with just a MacBook, so that doesn't help), making a trailer, website, etc. But I don't care, after twenty years I actually released my first game ;-) 

The future

For my next project I'll increase the time limit to a month and will cut my teeth on a roguelike! 

Thanks for reading,
Wesley