New founded Team Ape Egg!

Ape Egg was founded by me (@RamiCreates). My dream is to make a living by creating lovingly crafted games. I want to reach that goal inside of the year 2021. For 4 years I have studied Game Development full time and gathered experience in every field. My main focus lies in programming though.

My two partners are friends which I met when studying 3D-/Game-Design with them. They want to continue working with me on ShotgunWedding but because they have full-time jobs as Game Artists, we'll have to see to which extent they can support this project. Hopefully, in the feature, we can afford to create Ape Egg Games full-time!

The one who did all the Pixel Art and Textures is Nico. The one who did the 3D Meshes and Level Design is Nico. No really, this is no typo. They are both Nicos. To avoid confusion, we currently call our Pixel Artist Toast and our Level Artist Vegan. But anyway, I will write more about them another time.

What is Shotgun Wedding?

If you have played the Game, you can skip this section. If you haven't, and would rather continue reading, I give you a brief description:

Shotgun Wedding is a Platformer in which you cannot jump or walk. Sounds exciting?! Well actually ... it doesn't, does it? But wait, there are other ways to move! Use your shotgun to shoot the ground and blast off in the opposite direction! You have two shots, meaning you can give yourself a second boost in any direction while being airborne. 

The controls may be simple but you can get really creative and overcome all obstacles with different approaches. It's hard to understand just how much freedom this one mechanic offers, so I guess you have to try it for yourself after all :)

Cut corners and polished edges

The current version of the game was made for the 48 hour Mix And Game Jam. Even before the theme was announced, I already had a time plan written down and presented to the team members. We wanted to finish the concept in the first 3 hours - until Friday 10 PM. Saturday morning we'd discuss any new ideas that appeared to us and then start working.

In reality, it went even smoother than planned! We very quickly settled on a 2.5D Platformer shooter. By Saturday around 8 AM I already had structured all the classes I had to create in a UML Diagram. UML means Universal Modelling Language. I don't know if I am using a conventional format honestly, but creating it helped me a LOT! It took around 2 hours to create and then I could use it as a roadmap until the very end of the jam. It helped me keep on track and saved me a lot of time, confusion, and frustration in the end.

We also created a Task List on Google Sheets which helped us stay organized and made us able to track our progress nicely. Because of easily comprehensible progress tracking, time management was a lot simpler. We cut a lot of corners and weren't even able to include all of the Pixel Sprites.

There are also some bugs a lot of people told us about. The most common one is getting stuck on the edge of a platform. Due to time constraints, I wrote not so great code for checking, if the player is grounded. The story panel which we planned for our main menu had to be cut completely. The end of the game unfortunately is also just a Dead End.

Why? Why did it have to end like this! The poor man did his best to avoid the many dangers of the canyon and all he gets is this?! We're sorry, player!
Still, we're very proud that we went from Duck with Shotgun in front of an empty sky (I used an old Sprite of mine as a placeholder) on Saturday to an almost complete Level with multiple mechanics on Sunday.

We almost failed completely

I'm serious. We nearly failed to submit anything at all! Why? Because I didn't follow the time plan which I had prepared so carefully before the jam! As long as I sticked to the plan, all went well. But at the end, I deviated from it.

Everything was going so well, that I became overconfident. Yes of course I decided to submit a version 4 hours before the jam ends. But that was just overly cautious, right? It's a better idea to quickly cram in the most important features that are still missing, right?

-- No. Not at all. --

When finally uploading our project to itch.io, I realized my mistake. We got an error message when trying to upload the web build. This was the first time I tried to publish a game made in the Unreal Engine. Before, I worked with Unity and knew I just had to press "Build".
'But in Unreal I just have to press Launch, right? We still got 40 more minutes so this should be easy, right?'

-- No. Wrong again. --

Launch is used for Development. This means the Web Build only works offline and the Windows Build contained all our Assets which were up to grasp - Whoops! In Unreal, the correct term is 'Package'. When I found out, we still had 5 minutes. GO GO GO!

Sadly, packaging the project took about 10 minutes and gave out an error message. It was over. We lost.

But I was way too invested and stubborn to stop trying. There was no way I could start a productive work week without finding out what ruined my Sunday! So I kept trying and debugging and waiting for compilation. In the end, I found that the culprit was a simple Checkbox in my project settings. The official unreal page for creating a web build states, that the box should be ticked. Unticking again, fixed my problem.

Stupid! Such an unnecessary mistake! Well, now I had a Web Build, but what to do with it?
Fortunately, we simply got extremely lucky. After explaining our Problem and our Situation, we were allowed to submit the build a bit after the deadline - A Light at the end of the Cave!

And the Developers lived happily ever after

Thanks to the understanding and caring Jam Organizers, we made it after all! I had a lot of fun reading kind comments of players and writing our development story into this article. Hopefully, you learned something from it or at least enjoyed reading it.

More content updates will follow, and if you want more Devlogs, I'll happily write more for you! We always appreciate feedback and critique, so be sure to let us know if you want anything!

Thank you,

Ramesh, aka. RamiCreates
Team Ape Egg

Twitter: @RamiCreates
Youtube: Rami Creates