Most, if not all, creative works have the ability to be polished. I am in the fortunate situation where there not only is a lot to polish but, in these past few weeks, I received and now have a sense of direction to my polishing.

"Guesstalt" was my submission to the Brackey's Game Jam 2020.1, and I had built the platformer with the notion that it may be my last independent project for a long time. Thus, this game was treated like an end of a chapter for me, a cumulative assessment, pulling in what I had learned since my first project here.

Spoilers, but I actually managed to get 21st out of the 725 overall and 7th in Innovation! In this devlog, I'll go over my inspirations, the feedback I received, and the changes I made but the topics will be grouped with relevancy.

This week-long jam's theme was "Holes". Although I was late to enter the jam, the theme immediately sparked something in my mind, Gestalt's Law of closure:

People can perceive a smaller square between the 3/4-circle's "holes" despite the square never being fully outlined. With this, I started to see what other Gestalt Laws I can fit in my game. The main mechanic ended up being the ability to flip whether the player collides with black or white platforms through jumping into "dimensional holes". This was inspired by the famous 2 face vs 1 vase picture where the Gestalt Law of Figure and Ground (also called Pragnanz) can allow people to alternate between perceptions:

However, I felt like I needed one last mechanic, and surprisingly, it was the most divisive part of the game. In the feedback I received, the most common "bug" mentioned were that there were invisible walls. One comment even left the following screenshot of my game:

The law I tried to implement was the Gestalt Law of Symmetry where the player would need to realize that what they are able to stand and walk around on is the mirror image of the platforms below the floor. For those who have noticed this mechanic, this was their favorite part of the game. For those who did not catch this, many assumed that it was a bug. I believe that a different Gestalt Law was actually interfering with my intentions, the Law of Similarity, where people were assuming that only visibly-reachable white platforms would collide with the player when the world is black. Thus, in this post-jam build, I have re-textured the floor and the other mirror platforms to hint that a different mechanic is in play, and I animated the mirror platforms to attract attention to them.

For feedback, I also received a few comments about how the player was not able to finish the game in the chase sequence due to either the player being too slow for the thief or the player jumping over and being faster than the thief. Adjustments to the enclosing walls have been made to quicken the pace of this last sequence.

So I kept mentioning how this was a summary of my past work. I'll quickly list what I pulled.

First of all, I re-used my player Asset from "Inside Scoop", a story-based simple platformer that was one of my largest passion projects. I had initially planned to change the player sprite, but in the week, I decided that it would be best for me not to spend too much time there. So here I have Detective Scoop from my previous game running around. I needed to make a story quick.

I'm not the biggest fan of "magic" when explaining abnormal qualities, yet I decided to blame this dimension warping mechanic on a crystal. The crystal's thief calls it a color crystal as this was actually a reference to my last game jam where I worked on a team to make PRISM, a game where the player would reach the end of the stage to donate one of their colors to resonate into the world.

The more reproducible art for me on FireAlpaca was using an contour-less crayon style, the style used in the cutscenes. This is the style I have first used in my Purple/Porple games. In fact, I have thought about that game for a while with the "Holes" theme, yet I figured that too many people would interpret holes as portals anyway.

For the final chase sequence, I wanted the level to last as long as the player can run, so I made it loop, similar to the mechanic I used in UpperCrust, my first game jam game.

Finally, the thief that Scoop manages to catch is unmasked only to have Scoop not recognizing who it is. I had based the thief's unmasked design off of the player character in my first collaborative project, Bossbattles. The music when chasing the thief in this game also references the song made by Sam (doesn't have an itch.io I can link) for Bossbattles.

This post-jam update would not be perfect, but I'm glad that I'm able to make at least one update before my likely hiatus.

Thank you all who read up to this point, those who played the game, those that left comments, those that participated and voted in the jam, and those who might be stumbling upon this in the future. 21st ain't half bad and having 111 votes and over a hundred comments has been invaluable. Thank you, and I hope to see you all again.