Austin’s independent games collective Juegos Rancheros hosted another game jam this summer, and this year the theme was “mystic western”.
I hadn’t initially planned on participating, since I was already rather busy preparing for some summertime travelling. However, I was struck with a fun game idea that really fit the theme and scope. I wanted to make a game based on a specific scene from a 1997 episode of The Simpsons, where Homer hallucinates a mysterious voyage through a desert landscape under the influence of extremely spicy chili peppers.
For the gameplay, I took inspiration from the indie platformer Knytt Stories by Nifflas. It has a very clean, blocky, simple aesthetic that seemed feasible to imitate, even with my limited art skills. I also wanted to emulate its low-key pacing and its focus on exploration over combat. Having enemies to fight wouldn’t fit the vibe of the source material, where the mystic desert was mysterious but not threatening. Ultimately, I managed to translate almost every beat of the five minute hallucination sequence into some sort of playable experience (with the notable exception of the snake, which sadly was cut for scope.)
Developing a platformer was also a good excuse to apply some of the lessons I learned from Steve Swink’s “Game Feel”. The book breaks down and analyzes the ways in which designers manipulate game physics in unrealistic ways to make platformers feel good. For instance, it taught me to increase gravity when the player is descending to avoid feeling floaty. I also implemented variable jump height, input buffering, and late jumping based on the lessons from this book.
You can download El Viaje Misterioso for Windows and OSX here:
Download from itch.io
Download (Windows)
Download (Mac OSX)
Source Code (GitHub)
At the end of the game jam, I was very proud to find out that my entry was one of the 25 games selected for the Mysteric Western Arcade at the Marfa Film Festival. I sadly couldn’t make it out for the event, but I hope people got a chance to play it there!
