After months of procrastination, I finally decide to take part in a game jam (just 2 weeks before my end semester exams), and registered my name for the WGJ19 and got ready for the theme release.

Exactly at 10:30pm on 16th November, the theme for the game jam – “Attraction” – was released.

Spent a good day to jot down all interpretations of the them that my mind could build.

A day down my notes showed, gravity and physics, and couples and theme parks. Being an engineer (in works), physics made the most sense. So with around 24hrs spent, I started prototyping my best ideas in Unity for the feasibility and the fun. I came up with:

  • Prototype 1: Use gravity to guide the ball to final. Insanely difficult that one. So I just dumped it.
  • Prototype 2: Control a star and eat other stars. Just didn’t seem right. SCRAP!
  • Prototype 3: Have gravity pull a lot of balls towards our guy, who had to evade the balls using the maze walls. Now here I found how fun the attraction thing was. Balls were simply orbiting the player till they hit. I had to let go, because I couldn’t think any further ways to make it fun and as is it wasn’t very involving.
  • Prototype 4: A platformer where the player stuck to the platform of his/her choice. After a while for buggy platforming and sliding, I realized I could combine the orbiting of the previous prototype and this platforms idea. And voila – Neo was born!

Game development is an iterative process. So the answer is always quick prototyping.

So far so good, it was Tuesday already, and submission was on Thursday. I started scripting the exact mechanics and behaviors of the game, along with working on the art. (Not my best domain)

I came up with a magnet sprite in GIMP which was not a lot of work just very simple edits, some artistic flare. Ok, fine. It was an orange cirle.. Now, for the name, I thought of MagBall, AttractBall, Neodynium Jump - this is where Neo later came from.

Finally with the core game ready, one day prior to submission I wanted to make a logo for the game. So I tried making a MagBall logo using GIMP. It was too tedious and I was too tired. So I just picked up the magnet sprite that I made, scaled it up, and copied it to make the ‘m’ and then realized I wouldn’t last and that Neo might be easer. Cue the ‘e’ and two magnets to make ‘o’ and the all that remained was a bit of cut and paint-bucket. Just had to rename the game, that’s all. (Creativity is born from constraints, yada yada yada)

By this time the core behaviour, UI, Menus, and save-game system was in the game. Just for the looks, I added a Trail Renderer to the ball. Still found something to be lacking. It was too silent…

Went up to Kevin MacLeod’s website and downloaded the most fitting piece of classical music I could think of.

And finally, Neo was ready to publish on itch.io

Here is the product. Playable on browsers, or downloadable for Mac and Windows