On Designing Into CTRL

I'm writing this on the Tuesday following the 48-hour jam that led to Into CTRL, mostly so that it is still fresh in my mind. 

We started off on the first evening by brainstorming some ideas, I can remember talking about a 2D platformer where the controls would change randomly, and some discussion about whether we wanted the game to be fun or not. We knew from the beginning that we were working in a 2D art style because that's what our artist specialized in, and I think our art turned out pretty well. There's a giant whiteboard in Mike's office that I'll take a picture of later, he's out right now so I don't feel comfortable going in there. We used it to write up a lot of our initial ideas, and around the time the jam ended I wrote "WE DID IT!" across everything. So have fun parsing that cross-hatching.

I suggested a dumb tangent, not really related to the prompt, of "What if you had a bunch of little monsters in your keyboard and you had to press keys to herd them into a pen". The main picture in my head was about visualizing a keyboard as a physical place where things lived, partly inspired by some of those resin keycaps that I see floating around twitter and facebook with little biomes inside of them. Through the power of group imagination, and through incorporating the theme better, we decided that "you start every level out of CTRL, and have to get into CTRL".

A lot of the work at the beginning was setting up systems and making everything work together, but I was bouncing around writing up design documentation on enemies and powerups and level design, as well as helping Nick out some with a little C#. Doing design documentation early and putting it in front of everyone else was extremely valuable, because it was wrong. As it turned out, we all had slightly different ideas of what the game was going to be. In my mind, it was closer to a tiny RPG where you would have a turn-based battle on every key and would choose between a basic attack or using a powerup you had picked up. The powerups would have had multiple uses, and would have been used strategically. We instead opted to go for a more arcade-like feel, mainly fueled by the desire to make players move through levels as quickly as possible. This was further enforced by adding in a timer, and eventually setting it to 30 seconds per level.

The enemies were originally going to move around in patrols, but that just didn't end up happening. Several people were writing different systems and they never ended up talking to each other, but c'est la vie. The intention for this, for me, was always to view it as a prototype. If enough people like it, we could come back to it and actually make it everything we ever wanted.

We had said that since the levels were so short, we should do 20 of them. I designed the basic frameworks of all of the levels, mainly with the intention of drip-feeding new enemies and powerups so that we could throw them all in together later. I only got through 15 of those level designs, and as a result certain enemies and powerups only show up once. Again, we at least now know how the different enemies and powerups should be used if we were to revise the levels.

Finally, a few apologies. The points being so slow at the end is originally my fault - I just set it to a constant number between ticks, which doesn't scale well to large score values. Mike and I worked together to fix it for half an hour, and it worked in-editor, but for whatever reason it wouldn't change anything in a WebGL build. The other thing that was my fault is that the game resets you to level 1 upon death - this was for two reasons - the first is that the levels are so short that I thought it would give players a chance to get even higher scores if they had to repeat the levels, and the second is that I didn't think it would be terribly easy to die other than running out of time. Even so, a three-life system would have made more sense, and if we update the build again, I will probably put one in.

Anyways, thanks for all of the positive feedback, everyone on the team has been excitedly reading comments. Thanks for playing!