This will be my second attempt at participating in the monthly Metroidvania challenge. And unlike my first attempt, I will for surely and for truly submit something (last time my game corrupted, long story).

For those of you who haven’t heard about this game jam challenge; designers, coders, artists, musicians and more get together to try to make a Metroidvania like game in a month. And for those of you who want more details on what a game like that is.

It’s not an easy challenge in my opinion. There’s so much to take into account, last time I was close to making a short game with 3 areas and their own bosses. This time I’m going to scale down and up at the same time.

Usually, it’s kind of a given that a metroidvania is 2d, and usually a platformer. Since I’m still in the honeymoon phase of VR, I want to go in that direction format-wise. So what that essentially means, I’m making a FPS with metroidvania elements.

At the time of writing this, the jam has officially started this morning and I’m just gathering my notes and designs that I’ve been sketching for the past week in my notes app.

My game in mind;

The last jam I participated in, I vaguely had an idea of what I wanted to make and it showed in the final build (it was just a week of time to work on the game but still, I should have been more focused) so this time I made a rough draft of what to keep in mind and how to kinda go about it so that doesn’t happen again.

During the last jam I had a lot of fun making climbable things so for this game I wanted to put that in the front, at least for the beginning. So for the beginning half-ish of the game I want to make it so that the player is generally heading in an up direction and maybe make it so that is the implied goal without text, to climb out of wherever you are.

The theme of this jam: Alchemy

So each month there is a theme for an added challenge, its not mandatory but for people like me it’s a welcome challenge to spin our heads around more. I specifically tried to keep the game idea/setting vague so that when the theme was revealed I could pivot easily. But while this one is creatively spurring my brain juices I had already themed the game to be something sci-fi and alchemy isn’t very much that to me without some different kind of paint… I’ll have to think about it.

My planned preliminary level building steps

One of the things that’s at the forefront of this game jam is the process of how I’m going to make this game world become a thing without me pulling my hair mid-challenge.

In the below image with the desk in the center I was testing that build process. I tried building in blender with Sprytile, import the model file into Unity and add the box colliders needed. It’s all fine and dandy, it’s quick-ish and I can see my results relatively quick. BUT, a lot of time is spent picking and placing the right tile in Sprytile.

When adding props to the levels I’m probably going to build voxel-based assets. With that in mind, since the world is already going to be 3d-tile based and the Quest headset doesn’t like doing transparency, I could build the rooms base meshes within the voxel model maker and then paint on the tiles using sprytiles brush tool.

This way I don’t get distracted with painting the ‘right tile’ when building the level and I can focus on that when I’ve tested the level and don’t sink more time developing how it looks when it might change after some testing.

So yeah, lots of things to do to make this world a realized place, wish me luck and a month from now, if we’re lucky, you’ll have a free metroidvania vr game for the quest from me. Until next time!