Color Wave

On 2017 I joined the Electric Game Sauce team once more. My knowledge of Unity was still limited, but I had enough of it to give a hand at level design while also keeping my post as 3D art assistant. When the time had come the year's theme was announced: "Waves".

I remember that after our brainstorming session everyone suggested a tottaly different game from the other, but our main concern this time was having something almost done by the first day while leaving the second one just for bugfixes, ballance changes and polish. The final decision was taken by our programmer, who would be the one working the most especially at the first hours of the event. He choose to do the puzzle-platformer-fps idea, which I recall being his own, with an overall theme of fast-food joints, hamburgers and waves of sauces. He then tasked our main artist for early assets and our solo musician for songs. Since I was the least experient, and still without game mechanics to use when creating levels, I went to sleep early.

Around 8 hours later I woke up and encountered the programmer in the hallway, coming from the opposite direction. He put his hand in my shoulder and said "The game is programmed, have fun making levels, I'm going to sleep".

When reuniting again with the rest of the team, I got word of what we had exactly in our hands and what we had to do. At first, a simple platformer where white cubes, when colored, would react in different ways to the player - red would make them shrink and allow passage through them, blue would make them extrude horizontaly when close enough and act as retractable bridges, and finally yellow would make you bounce and jump higher. Midway through the game you would get the Color Wave Gun, allowing yourself to change these cubes at will, with more colors being picked up further along the way. Then you would have timed puzzles, puzzles requiring multiple colors, leaps of faith and even some degree of parkour.

It was amazing. The game already played and looked great, and we were doing everything almost twice as fast as expected. The second day was used mostly to make a lot of levels and to bring other jammers to playtest them. Reception was massively positive. People would gather around whoever was playing it to watch. Players lost track of time when playing, especially because our levels would load during gameplay instead of having loading screens. We even had a mascot oversee the players all the time - the Giant Burguer In The Sky (which I take credit for) - that acted as the last obstacle in the last level, where only by entering its mouth that you would be greeted with a "Thanks For Playing" message.

After the huge success that the event was for ourselves, we decided to keep developing the game. First we started making a even more polished version, with a plot along the lines of "you won the opportunity to eat the first burger at the newest burger joint, and when you do it you start hallucinating the events of the game". Then, we signed in for Steam Greenlight while also contacting the maximum number of Let's Players we could, so we could get even more feedback for our game while also getting views and votes on our page. After a couple of weeks we would get our approval inside the Greenlight program, which meant that the only thing left to do was actually make the full game.

The thing is, after all that effort, everyone was tired. And while half of the team was in standby, either awaiting orders or waiting for others to finish their tasks, the other half was distant, demotivated about working even more. We even had our agreements about royalties and expositure and how just awesome would be to have such a successful game published at sites like Steam and GOG. But in the end I think that distance was the main factor which halted our attempts at progress. Working together at our Global Game Jam site was one thing, but when everyone resumed their normal lifes that feeling of commitment was lost.

Still, taking part on it was a blissful and fulfilling experience for me. By the time of writing this, it's the best game I have ever worked on.

You can download the Greenlight version at:
https://electric-game-sauce.itch.io/color-wave

Here is the original project, made during the event:
https://globalgamejam.org/2017/games/color-wave

More info can be found at:
https://colorwavegame.wordpress.com/