The Making of Marty the Mailman

Thank you all so much for playing my game! If you haven't yet, you should! Any feedback is appreciated since I plan on seeing this game through to the end. I just wanted to take you guys through some of the problems and successes I encountered over the course of the jam.

To start, this is my second My First Game Jam (confusing, I know). The first time around, I decided to join a game jam about 45 minutes after my first time opening the Godot game engine. Suffice to say, it did not go very well. While I did successfully get a game out the door, it was not something I was particularly proud of. It was too hard, the levels were a bit clunky, there were glitches everywhere, and more. So over the next year, I honed my programming skills and tried to understand as much as I could. I also revisited the project, and within 10 minutes found out just how bad that code was.

This year, I was determined to get things right. I looked at more documentation, re-learned what i had forgotten, and far more. I also spent lots of time getting familiar with my sprite art software, Aseprite. Right off the bat, things went horribly wrong. I had forgotten that I was still wrapping up an online class and I had to finish before I could even start! I powered through and finished the last third of the course in only seven days. Unfortunately, this meant I was already down seven days and had not even opened a new project. I had still been brainstorming ideas when I could, but nothing much came of it.

 My first idea was a more technical platformer (like Celeste), but with guns. These guns would all have unique recoil and make movement really fun. I started out with a basic character controller. this took me far less time than the previous year, and it was smoother, butterier, flakier. Was this a Butterfingers? No, it was my game, and it tasted great! I added a gun swapping system so that you could actually have different guns. I prototyped the shotgun and the pistol. The shotgun was supposed to be the main movement tech of the game. testing the guns without being able to see any textures or animations really sucked though, so I went on a bit of a spree and made most of the art for the game in that one pass. While designing the character, I noticed he looked a lot like a mailman. At that moment, Marty was born.

I still liked the shotgun, but it seemed to fit less and less. It felt out of place. I got as far as making particle effects and collisions with the aliens and a damage system before deciding that it was better to scrap it entirely when I had the idea of throwing mail as a weapon. Rather than overhaul the systems, the mail throwing mechanism is technically a gun that can be swapped in and out, if any other guns were left in the game. I also decided to scrap health bars and things like that. everything was either alive, or dead. Hit by mail, or not. Simple as that.

I needed at least a loose explanation of why there were aliens and why they dropped mail as loot. It was obvious! Nevada is full of aliens, right? the inital story fell into place (still in progress), you are a mailman in Nevada. Aliens like to steal mail to study the human race. Bound by duty, you must vanquish this threat and complete your delivery run. I plan to make at least four worlds that take you through multiple locations, like a space station. Unfortunately, I cannot disclose the rest of the info (I haven't written any story after this).

While developing my previous game, my friends were speedrunning the game and timing themselves on their phones. I realized this time around that it would be a huge source of replayability if I were to add a timer to the game. This immediately paid off, and the current record is held by MiceOrMouses with this run

if you have any questions about the game, or you want to know more about the development, just comment down below, and I will likely respond.

also, huge thanks to my dad for finding the music and helping with playtesting and brainstorming