Unlike most games, this game will not start with a design doc.

This game, unlike all the previous games, is, right now, just a piece of a story, something I want to tell. All my previous games began as mechanics, and grew into their own, but this will be quite different.

This game will use mechanics as a means to an end, rather than an end in themselves. As such, more than ever, I will need to focus on mechanics that work right, rather than the mechanics I want.

Perhaps this is a weak teaser, but I want the game to speak for itself, once it is complete. So all I will reveal is what I am calling it right now: "Stay Calm, Soldier"

Reflections

This game changed quite a bit in such a short amount of time. Much of the original design was both unreasonable for the timeframe, and also making some pretty big assumptions about players' prior game experiences. Thanks to Jet's input, both artistically and creatively, I transitioned to this (hopefully) more accessible game. That being said, working with someone else on the game is quite different, and a valuable experience unto itself. Additionally, although I did not have to spend time creating the art, I had to spend some time adjusting it to work in the game, and, particularly when I first switched artwork, I had to rework a lot of the code to handle the much larger-scale images. Similarly, the fact that (almost) none of the art assets fit nicely into a grid made Flixel (the framework I use for my flash games) substantially less appropriate. In future projects where I collaborate with an artist, I plan on using Unity instead (it seems to be designed with assets that do not conform to a grid in mind.)