HECKS Post-Mortem
HECKS is a local multiplayer touch-device game for 2 players. HECKS is a passion project of Bryan Winters, a friend and coworker. In HECKS, two players take turns placing pieces on a hexagonal grid, attacking other pieces to gain control over the majority of the board before it fills up. I entered the project as the artist and to assist Bryan with design work. We successfully met our target goal of a functional 2 player game running on devices after 48 hours.
This was a super weird jam game, because I haven’t done a jam as a non-programmer (ever). I also haven’t worked with Bryan on a project since we tackled university projects together in second year (admittedly, we typically waited until we had 48 hours left to tackle those as well). It was pretty nice to be in a more casual role for the jam, as I typically take a lead role. A lead role allows more freedom over the project, but it brings with it the responsibility to not let other team members down. It’s also great being an artist in a short jam, because even when your art doesn’t make it in the game you still have something to show off. I can’t imagine all the code I’ve written that no one will ever see / experience. While it was a great jam overall, I’m certainly going to do programming for the next jam.
What Went Right
Overall, the entire project went extremely well. We pre-planned some of it, but not enough for us to go into the jam feeling ‘safe’. I haven’t done more than an hour’s worth of pixel art at a time for about 4 years, so when I set up my fancy laptop and started trucking, I had no idea how to budget my time, I simply knew I had to create around 20 unique creatures balanced across 3 motifs. It ended up taking me about 10 hours on Saturday to create the majority of the game’s UI and 9 creatures. I was worried going into Sunday that I’d fall short of my commitment. This was all in stark contrast to Bryan, who texted me Sunday morning telling me the ‘game’ was done - even without a title screen or ability to play 2 games in a row, the project was coming along faster than I expected.
An interesting sidenote is that I learned quite a bit about numerical operations in photoshop. I had previously done all my work with the mouse, grids and guidelines, but the mathematical accuracy required by the hex grid involved using numeric entry to get exact angles and positions for a majority of the UI work. |
I ended up bringing both my ‘art laptop’ and my ‘code laptop’ to the jam on Sunday. My art laptop has a special pressure sensitive Wacom digitizer in the screen, so I can draw on it. We managed to finish off everything we needed on Sunday. I even got to add a silly bit to the game that makes the screen’s deadspace a live feed of the front facing camera! I removed 90% of the red channel from the camera and fluctuated the blue channel over time using a sine function in the shader - This was the only code I wrote all weekend. Everything worked out great!
The game was functionally complete at 3:30PM on Sunday, but Bryan and I spent about an hour filling it with content. In that time we upped the creature roster from 3 to 19! It was interesting to see a data driven aspect of game jamming like this, as my typical jam games rely on unique mechanics. People dug all the different monster’s art, names and attacks! |
What Went Wrong
I wrote that I had gotten less than half of my target character art done on Saturday. While I still managed to complete the required art, a lot of it is fairly rushed. I would like to take another pass at the art and substantially change a lot of the more rushed art assets - some are obvious amalgamations of existing assets.
Aside from that, we had a minor GIT issue. Luckily Bryan was the only programmer, so GIT was mostly used to send art and builds back and forth, but its always a pain when you have to work on your tool chain rather than, you know, your game.
What Happens Now
HECKS is definitely Bryan’s thing, so you’d have to ask him! I’m happy to have been a part of its creation, and it looks as though my work will be in it if it sees some kind of commercial release. I’m not hopping onto it as a side project, simply because I’m digging back into Huskerball soon (I just finished the jam version of Star Duck as of this writing). Since Huskerball is getting scaled down a bit, I may help out with some HECKS work in a few months. I’d love to write some AI or help with an online component, but nothing is concrete yet. If Bryan wants it, I’d love to clean up any of my art that might make it into the final version of the build!
