Hey all. This is just a general wrap up doc about this project. My name is Erik and the other dev working on this is Alex. 

Alright, so this game jam happened to coincide with a trip I had scheduled and some other obligations Alex had. We really only had about 3 days to work on it- so sorry for the rough appearances. I pulled an all-nighter before my trip and Alex worked for about 12 hours straight 3 days in a row to get things to where we are now.

We met up the day of the theme announcement at a coffee shop and spent our first couple hours gathering assets and coming up with our base idea. We figured just about everyone else was going to make a rogue-like of some kind and wanted to avoid that for our submission. Lots of ideas passed around right away. Could personify Death of course... Some other submissions went that route to good effect so I'm glad we didn't focus on it. 

Then we rationalized that "death" doesn't have to mean our own. Maybe we could make a game about killing enemies to gain their powers? Kinda like Kirby or something. Partway through our brainstorming session we thought about playing as a character with a parasite that brings you back to life but makes the game harder the longer you stay alive. That concept ultimately didn't sound fun when we sketched out the mechanics for it, but it did eventually lead to the astral projection/possession idea we settled on.

The goal we had established was to make a game wherein the player starts in a jail cell. Then has to use astral projection to send their soul out of their body to possess an enemy guard. They could use a few different powers that charge up based on the number of enemies defeated. The win condition was to fight your way to the boss in the prison control room. Release your body from the cell by opening the doors then return to it and escape. Ultimately as long as there was a corpse to possess you could continue to fight. But the longer you stayed a ghost the closer and faster the reaper gets until eventually he steals your soul and that's game over.

We ran out of time and had to cut the more advanced AI behaviors, boss, spectral powers, and a few more things. But we still managed to get the basic combat, possession mechanics, and the reaper in before the deadline. There is a door you can escape out of and a sequence of buttons needed to be pressed to open it. So the player has a win/lose condition, and that was all we really all we could ask of ourselves. 

We didn't use any pre-made assets other than the enemy/player sprites which we would have switched out if we had an extra day. I'm reasonably proud of our progress. Sounds and the grim reaper were implemented pretty much at the very last second. The backend programming for this looks like spaghetti to the max and I'm going to spend the next little while refactoring everything and doing some housekeeping. It's likely that we'll continue to work on this idea after the jam is finished and hopefully there will be a full release of the concept some day.

I'll attach a couple behind the scenes images to this post with art that we were working on.