Devlog "So Bad, It's Good Game Jam"

So Bad, It's Good Game Jam - Alien gone wrong » Devlog

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"SO BAD, IT'S GOOD" Game Jam

A theme screaming for attention. Finally something that does not expect any good looking or polished game. A jam for the simpel man (and woman). What could possibly go wrong in this jam?

Well, the jam still requires a good idea and a somewhat fun to play game. So let's start with an amazing idea: I had a good idea for a "fan-made" game for the fantastic, classic movie gem: ALIEN 1. Who doesn't love that amazing movie and its pot: A facehugger jumping onto an astronaut, giving birth to a little-baby Alien by cracking through that poor guy's chest

What could possible be more bad than a REALLY BAD REMAKE of that chest-cracking scene with a horribly looking cube-style game? A game that matches other bad games such as that Southpark FPS game on PS1, where you can pee on snowballs and fight giant turkeys? Yes, that is the bar I am aiming for.

The idea was born, now it was time to think about what actually makes a BAD game and how I could deliberately make a game worse than it already is? I believe, the following components are a recipe for success:

Graphics that are out-of-this-world bad, even by 1980s game design standards
Game mechanics that are wonky, sloppy, poorly programmed and unncessarily complicated
Barely enough fun to suffer through to the next level, don't make it too fun

Bad Graphics: To ensure that I get really bad graphics, I decided to finally try texture painting in Blender. I never used that before and now is the perfect time to try painting faces on 3D cubes. After a few hours, I do have 6 painfully ugly characters, plus an almost-cute Alien. I wonder if they are too horrible though; I feel ashamed by them - maybe I don't need to WIN this competition - maybe I should also have somewhat decent graphics, no?

Bad Game mechanics: Bad game mechanics should make the game's goal harder than they need to. But not because of a great challenge, simply because it is poorly designed and painful. So, I had the amazing (?) goal that you are in fact the Alien inside the chest. By pressing SPACE 10 times, you make your way through the chest and escape. But then I thought - hang on, why only 10 times? And why only 1 Alien? To make a REALLY dumb and "so bad, it's good" game mechanics, I thought about the following: Instead of just 1 Alien with 1 key that you have to press to crack through the chest, you have to spam 6 keys at the same time, to give birth to 6 Aliens. That is 40 key strokes x 6 = 240 key strokes in 10 seconds. Obviously, all 6 keys are spread across the keyboard - that is really inconvenient and will surely score high on the SBIG scale!

Fun: Not much challenge in this first level - that's for sure. But still, it is so stupidly designed, that it is almost a challenge, to smash those 6 buttons quickly enough. If I fail, I am annoyed and want to try again. Exactly the kind of "fun" I would expect. Sidenote: I should research, if I can randomly generate the input keys so that each time you fail, the 6 keys are randomly replaced, so it gets even MORE annoying! Not sure if that works though - let's find out at the end, if I have enough time.

The scripting was really easy, just a few if-statements for those 6 keys, if you pressed it 40 times, it spawns a prefab Alien with a movement script attached; accompanied by enough blood splatter on the cam itself and the characters' chests to make BRAINDEAD (the old 80s splatter movie) look like a non-violent movie.

I think, I have a good start. But there is a need for more levels. An ambitious goal would be to have one famous Alien scene for the 4 Alien movies- That way it has a real "fan-made" touch. Some ideas for the other Alien movies:

Alien 2 is all about shooting and killing hundrets of Aliens. Why not have a turret shooter scene, where you have INVERTED controls (to be as wonky and dumb as possible) and all you need to do is kill 100 Aliens. It sounds almost too good, so let's think about how we can torture the player more, as I get more ideas over the next days
Alien 3 is all about killing inmates. So maybe I can have a level around the mouth-in-a-mouth mechanic of the Alien. It could be somehting like "eat 10 inmates" but you have to use four really unusual keys to navigate, instead of WASD UFJL for example? That and another invertered controls? Or is that excessive?
Alien 4 is a tricky one. Evil scientists are trying to tame Aliens and mass-produce them (what could possibly go wrong, humanity?!). So in a way it is about love and reproduction. What if...You are the scientist behind the bulletproof (or acid-proof) window and you need to furiously click male and female Aliens to win (let's say a reasonable amount...40 pairs?); if you misclick, you die - try again. The window might make it hard to see and there might be steam blocking the view, so GOOD LUCK

That sounds like 4 painful but unique and almost-fun levels, doesn't it? Let's call it a day - I seem to enjoy torturing the players of this jam.

Lot's of progress for one day:

Day 2:

I came to realize, I am actually too proud to have such horrible characters. By accident, I stumbled upon a youtube tutorial on "MagicaVoxels" - HOLY COW! THIS IS WHAT I NEED IN MY LIFE RIGHT NOW! It is amazing! A tool that let's you build very simple cube characters, but in 3D. Pretty much exactly what I need! I feal that a cube with a texture on it is much too simplistic, even for a SBIG game jam. The characters right now are lacking depths and just feel pale and without life. Having them in the voxel style is much better I believe. I should really aim for characters that you can distinguish and recognize the different characters if you put the Alien scene right next to it. If I go for that Voxel style, I can also add a second character with an open chest, after the Alien baby burst out of the chest. Good idea, let's just hope that I can learn MagicaVoxel quickly enough!

Ok, that went fairly well; I just finished the 7 characters in MagicaVoxels. I think the captain looks fairly well:

I decided to start from scratch. I could not get used to that HD render pipeline; the colors were messed up, lighting a nightmare - no idea what to do with that... But it was worth it! I remade the entire scene and made it more similar to the style:

I also added a death model, where the chest ist burst open :) Looks good I think!

Day 3:

Surprise, I changed the game idea again; instead of going for one scene for four different Alien movies, I decided to go for 3 scenes only from Alien 1. The three levels I have in mind now are :

The player has to run through a field of Alien eggs and if he gets too close to some of them, the facehugger jumps onto him
The Acid dripping scene, where the acid burns a hole into the ship's layers
The button smashing level where 6 Alien babies are spawned

For that acid dripping level, I started work on a primitive Voxel model. Added a Mathf.pingpong script onto the character and if I press SPACE the character stops. That will allow the acid to be slighlty stopped by the character. And guess what, you need to sacrifice the crew members to stop the dripping. To add a bit of SBIG-flair, I decided to have different keys for each level to stop the character from moving, the crew members also have different speed levels, so you have to try a few times to win the level :D

Day 4:

I found out that in MagicakVoxel you can genereate a random noise; the result is a perfect cave for my egg level. Adding a few lights here and there and BAM, a decent looking level:

I also felt like working on the Menu. It is hard to make it look bad enough and to deliberately choose painful colors and compositions and resisiting the urge to make it look as best as I can: