User ID: mio
Subject: Plankter Retrospective

Recently, I partook in Purism's Free-Software Game Jam that was hosted on itch. It was quite a bit of fun! Despite entering with only a week remaining, I still managed to throw together a game called "Plankter". It's a short adventure game that has you take control of two different characters: Dr. Plankter and Pixel.

Starry background with the text 'Plankter' in the center. The sprite of Pixel the dog is above the text and the sprite of Dr. Plankter (a paraplegic in a wheelchair) is on either side of the text.
Cover image for Plankter.

The story ended up being the main focus of the game (I'll be the first to admit the gameplay and graphics are lacking). The premise of the story is that Dr. Plankter and Pixel are exploring space and have just boarded an abandoned space station orbiting Pluto. This is where you start playing the game.

Upon reading the story again after the game jam finished, I feel it may come across a little rushed. That I've crammed too much in. The reason for this is because I did want to cram as much of the backstory in to set up an interesting (to me, at least) universe. The comments I received also seem to think the story was decent, so I guess that's something?

Shortcoming — Graphics

Depsite knowing that art is not my forte, I decided to create my own art for Plankter. This ended up costing me in score, but I enjoyed making them and learned a bit. I'm aiming to improve my pixel art skills for any future games.

There are two main problems with the graphics:

  1. The wall sprites not blocking the edge of the sprite.

    2. By this I mean that if the sprite is for a left wall, it should fill up to the right edge of the sprite. Failing to do this creates an "empty space" that appears to be a spot the player can walk on, but is in fact a wall (or in other words, an invisible wall).

  2. The floor sprites are blindingly white and don't contrast with Plankter.

Shortcoming — Gameplay

This is where I really lost points and I knew this would be the case. To build Plankter, I chose to use the Haxe programming language and HaxeFlixel as the game engine. Neither of which I've really used outside of a "Hello World" program. I'd been looking for a reason to use the, and this game jam looked like the right time. Learning these, along with the art and story, didn't leave me a lot of time to work on the actual gameplay.

To be honest, I didn't really know what sort of challenges to put in the game. I was initially going to attempt a puzzle where you had to find the key to open the door. This idea differs from what I actually implemented because the power was going to be out. There would be no lights, except for a small circle of light emitting from Dr. Plankter and Pixel. You would then have to navigate the hallways (in darkness) to find the key and the door. I was still going to have the computers, but they were going to be optional.

There is a demo on haxeflixel.com that demonstrates the lighting effect I wanted (just picture it being darker). I would have liked to adapt this to work in Plankter, but it makes use of shaders and that would be another topic to learn on top of Haxe, HaxeFlixel, Tiled, and Aseprite.

All in all, I enjoyed creating Plankter. I have begun working on a follow–up game, though nothing is published yet. You can play Plankter in a web browser on it's itch.io page (there is also a download for Linux). The source code is also available and licensed under the GPL3.