Help Me Help You Help Them Postportem

First jam game, so this was really more a forcing function to practice starting and finishing something at all. More an exercise in learning a library and breaking analysis paralysis on tools than anything else. Went with raylib and overall that was a good choice to focus on code to drive everything aside the UI and input. Will definitely keep going down that route.

The theme of "teamwork" had me originally considering something around a pair of characters that would help each other - the player would alternate between the two dying, each time playing with the replay of their last self in the other character. Needless to say that was way too much to commit to for a first game in the engine. 

Fortunately the constraint of "player cannot attack" saved me: I'd been toying with trying to boil down the MMO "holy trinity" (tank + healer + DPS) into a simplified version to see what really made it fun. Tanks and healers really don't get much love, so it seemed like a great opportunity to stretch them to their logical extremes of ONLY be able to take hits and ONLY be able to heal/buff. 

Once that core idea was in place it was pretty natural to do some kind of arcade design to stick to simple systems to build. Having the healer able to shield the tank seemed to work well in giving both characters a role; that made it easy to pivot to controlling both at once, since taking turns would be awkward if the healer was shooting things (as opposed to dropping pickups). Since I like more "systemic" designs and the goofs generated by friendly fire I generalized the shield to apply to everything - so the healer could buff the incoming enemies (or the targets to protect). Invincibility frames were natural for an arcade setting. 

It was only when I was (finally) deciding end conditions that I stumbled on the revival mechanic. It felt unfair to lose if only one character went down. It also felt unfair to snowball into failure when you only had one left. So having the two really working together by reviving was a nice compromise. That made the goal of a (mostly) score attack game more palatable than one based on winning/losing. It's not really tuned so the score attack doesn't work, as it shouldn't be too hard to get all the possible points from spawned greens. Next time I might start with an end in mind first, but I'm of two minds on that since I kinda prefer the focus on the core loop being fun before coming up with ending criteria (it's easier to change the goal than how you play).

Shortly before submitting I realized I didn't have time to make different screens for starting, stopping, showing tutorial, etc. Ended up just triggering text boxes with some tips on some conditions. This worked better than I thought, so I'll probably do it again or convert it into a simple system in the future. Personally I hate having tutorials get in my way, so I don't mind punting on implementing that until I have mature enough games that someone complains loudly enough (and it fits the style).

Time constraints work far better for me than I expected. I found myself spending a bit too much time trying to write "clean code" for things, so as the second day was getting on I had a good impetus to just crank through implementation. There's tons left behind I'll want to refactor and salvage as reusable snippets later. But it felt good to getting a working product together. With all the time crunch I dropped the ball on a few stretch goals like music, SFX, textures/sprites,...and having a web build. Frankly I'm ok with it as I didn't want the game to be attractive for polish and wanted to emphasize getting mechanics working. I have tons to learn in the other areas, so opening up too many new topics at once could easily lead me into overwhelm and abandoning the whole effort instead. 

Next time if I incrementally add any one thing it'd be publishing to web so more folks can access the game. I'm aiming for more than that (as I can set up the toolchain for web publishing and get that up some time between jams), but it's actually quite helpful for me to not make many upfront commitments to leave flexibility to pivot onto what's most motivating at the time. Looking forward to the next minijam for sure.