A brief history of Team Obelia

            While asking if we should take part in the Brachys Game Jam in September, we had to acknowledge how burned out some of our jammers were from the Pirate Software Game Jam

    The team size for the Brachys jam was suggested 4, no limit. Pirate Software was limited to 5, which gave us 2 coders, 2 artists, and a musician. A bit before this, we'd integrated a handful of notes about our dev plans for our newest game, Fiend.

    We started Obelia after our first game jam game Mach Gaia was completed. When we did this we knew we were going to do the next jam, we picked up a few interested friends to the team beforehand. We had OrobaSpyro as our first artist on Mach Gaia and follow up joint artist with Leonard_Fox. Leonard joined for Fiend mid development and took charge of management too. TheBattleMac joined as main coder for Fiend, replacing 0xIkari as our code editor from Mach Gaia Then Raptorjesus42 on music for both, and myself as coder for both, director for Fiend.

    0xIkari is with us in spirit but stepped away, and has since been handling school and work. They said putting a game jam on their resume was a great addition and helped get their job, which was much appreciated to hear. I can't believe we actually did it, let alone twice.  

    For our learners, we had TheBattleMac with his first finished joint game in Fiend, he absolutely knocked out our potion/shooting mechanic. Then Orobaspyro took the chair as lead artist for one game, joint artist on the second as they learn more about comics and games. Leonard took charge as manager and lead artist, a position I'm sure he must have worked before because he was amazing. Then Raptorjesus was asked to code more dark, orthodox and anthemic loops for the jam demo. We didn't get to include every loop which was sad, his music is so good. This was my first director position, the weight of directing was distressing and enlightening.

 

The Latest and Greatest: FIEND

    Fiend is a top-down puzzle shooter, The Alchemist navigating the dark layers of hell in search of the Philosopher's Stone. Plans were made for levels, upgrade systems, and at the front of it all we had our main jam theme as a mechanic:

            Light and Alchemy

    Send bottles of holy power and alchemical mastery to hold back the dark denizens of hell. Unleash elemental fire, ice, acid, and radiation alongside holy power to solve puzzles in the dark, as you fend off the hordes of the damned and monstrous.

    Our experience making fiend was led by 2 game docs by Mac and Myself, for "Screw You, Dilan!" and "Zoetrope" which were both similar in gameplay to the current jam demo of Fiend. Top down shooters with a focus on bullets, dodging and shooting them, both taking place inside of a vehicle. We settled on a character to be the face of the game instead, when we learned what the jam theme is. 

 

 

    Since the jam release of Fiend, we've been recovering for the month of august. Coming to September, some of us are still tied up or over exerted. The choice of adopting a new game to support and grow is turning up a "No" so far. So as we decide, its time for

A Brief History of Team Obelia

            Fiend wasn't our first choice for a second game, one game came before and the inspiration transformed into Fiend

    What followed with Mach Gaia was attempts at a new Obelia project, Power Platformer. Deeply inspired by Kirby 64's power combining and true end puzzle mechanics, this was intended as our first divergence into a new genre. We had all of the code for a platformer ready, we just lacked a critical part. This part was why the game floundered for five months.

     Power Platformer was a project between Orobaspyro and Myself. When the concept of elemental weapons came up in Fiend, I forget who suggested it, it felt a natural fit. Here's the moment we cut our teeth with the elemental combinations. No need to program complex movement, or design how that movement acts, we just have it.

    The system Mac created for Fiend was exactly it, the piece we had missed. What we had missed wasn't as important as for how long we missed it, we floundered for 5 months developing neither Mach Gaia or Power Platformer. We'd never stared burnout so hard in the face before, its no wonder we didn't recognize it.

 

 Development on Mach Gaia halted due to a fatal bug

     We'd cut a moving sprite out of mach Gaia, and couldn't manage many enemy types due to this. This problem we'd learn came from sprites that aren't centered, thus when they spun it would put players into the wall and teleport them all around. The game wouldn't operate like this. No way to reset a room, the game had to be restarted.

    Our map was crippled by a lack of understanding for the map tools in gamemaker, which are really nice now that I know how to use them. I was eventually able to force collision, but at the fault of enemies passing through walls, no turrets, and only one active enemy type.

    With a bug as fatal as the sprite tilt bug, we saw no reason to continue development until we had more perspective on game dev as a whole. This was a part of our 5 month burnout, and I really think this bug set it off harder than it would be usually.

        In Summary

    Fiend was highly successful where Mach Gaia, and Power Platformer were not.
A new team member came in, Leonard, and pushed high quality work.I was pushed into the director chair, and began to cut features I knew we couldn't make it over the finish line with, while editing the code and making maps. A new team member replaced Ikari as our second coder, Mac. He went on to program our alchemy/shooting feature day 1. With 2 game jam games behind us, we have a skeleton to build a new game on top of;

 
So, time for a new next month?

We are building resources
We're finding our roles more strongly
Our inexperienced members are learning the ropes and don't fear development

We're poised to finish and forget a new jam game, but do we really want to?