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[AlexVsCoding]

NOW AVAILABLE


Hey Folks,

I built this game a while back in January 2015 for Jam For Leelah, a game jam focused on building games around trans issues. Unfortunately, a very busy period of work meant I didn't ship it in time for the submission date (Although a lot of the infrastructure was there).

Fast forward to September and I used this project to showcase Stencyl as a tool whilst running a class. Within this, I added a lot of the functionality that I wanted to previously, except making it single player. Shortly afterwards, I decided it was close enough to finished (And nearly a year overdue), so I set about finishing the unnamed project at the time. After a month of tinkering, re-integrating the second player and refining the gameplay/narrative, the game is pretty much finished.

Before I release, I'll be chatting to the folks who organised the jam beforehand to check if there's anywhere particular they want traffic/donations to go to, otherwise the game should be out pretty soon.



DEVELOPMENT (Slight Spoilers Within)
[spolier]
Transgression was a particularly interesting project to work on for a bunch of reasons:

A: I am not transexual and thus lacked the experience to reference when constructing the game

B: I prefer with most of my games to handle narrative primarily through mechanics than storytelling

C: I wanted to handle the topic in a subtle manner without force-feeding players the message.

Having said the above, throughout development I spent time talking with friends and developers who were transexual or have dealt with discrimination due to gender or sexual preference. I liaised with Kara whilst planning the project to ensure Transgression was tackling the subject tastefully and in time I found ways of making the players change their behaviour to one another as the game progresses.

The game mechanics explore entitlement and privilege - Each player begin equal and over time the game slowly turns against one. The changes are subtle, meaning it's hard for the unaffected player to notice what's happening, whilst the other will find invisible strings working against them.

The other main hurdle was finding a way to explore discrimination without the topic being slotted into nationality or race, so making the players clones meant they were literally identical in all ways except the mind.

I decided to update the first post, so find below what the game used to look like before the last update![/spolier]

[AlexVsCoding]

Hey Folks,

So I've made a bunch of updates to the game before launch. These include:

Updated the itch.io page to look slicker than before.

Changed the backdrop - This has made a huge difference - the previous daytime/sunset backdrop was alright but the current darker one makes the neon lights punch and adds a lot more atmosphere to the project (Start the game with cool blues and end on sharp reds).

Added the ability to jump on each other's heads - This was causing a lot of problems E.g. Climbing some steps and one player standing on the others head (The one beneath can't jump because there's someone on their head and the player on their head isn't able to do anything except move off sideways, which sometimes isn't possible). Fixing this should save a lot of people stress. I might make it players can't collide with each other at all, but I'll leave that to playtesting.

Level 4 being far too hard - A huge number of enemies and not enough health going round makes this level notoriously difficult to get through. I've reduced the enemy number slightly but most importantly increased the rate that players receive health from their bot. This means when they reconvene on the lift some of the health lost is restored. It might still not be enough, but it should at least make it a bit easier (It is possible to beat).

Enemy behaviour tweaked - I altered the mass of the enemies to reduce their pushing force on the players and in turn tweaked their speed (Since reducing their mass caused them to accelerate). I also reduced the likelihood of enemies deflecting one another to 1 in a 1000 since they'd often get stuck to one another and not have enough of an interval to unstick.

Credits and Pause menu - In a similar manner to the intro text, I designed a credits sequence for the vast number of people who worked on the project (Two).

There's likely a bunch of other small fixes but at half 12 at night the bulk of them don't come to mind. Here's a bunch of gifs/screenshots of what the project looks like below. For anyone interested in giving it a go, I'll be launching it in the next day or so.

Stay tuned.

[AlexVsCoding]

Hey Folks! Just to let you know, the trailer is out and the game should be following shortly afterwards. I need sleep first at the very least:

[AlexVsCoding]

Hey folks, just to let you know TRANSGRESSION is now available! Hope you enjoy and please feel free to drop me some feedback.
http://alexvscoding.itch.io/transgression