Developer Interview: JaJitsu

Today, Ive got a special surprise of an interview with game developer JaJitsu. This is the beginning of a series of interviews that I will be doing around the independent community with developers, visual artists, and musicians. I asked JaJitsu to be the first artist that I would interview and he agreed. Keep checking back for new interviews with your favorite Indie developers,artists, and musicians.

Interview with JaJitsu

Sharkarm: Okay, so so can you start with your name, age, and are you attending a school?
JaJitsu : My name is Jason Boyer, I'm 18 (turning 19 this year) and I'm studying Illustration at The Art Center College of Design in Pasadena.

Sharkarm: Okay, how long have you been into indie game development?
JaJitsu: Haha, not very long actually. I started working on Jables at the beginning of this summer.

Sharkarm: What would you say got you into making games?
JaJitsu : Well I didn't even know about the indie game community till playing Tower of God, and then I was watching Annabelle Kennedy on Deviant art which somehow linked me to the underside and soon I found all the great games along with TIG [www.tigsource.com].

Sharkarm: Haha, awesome, and so did you immediately start working on your own game? Or what got you started on your own game?
JaJitsu : As a kid I always had making a game in my head, but I never did more than art. Then seeing others make these small games I had no reason not to.

Sharkarm: So were you a gamer as a kid? What games influenced you as child or what were some of your earliest influences in video games?
JaJitsu: I always liked Zelda a lot. My oldest character [that I designed] is named Zell (not because of ZELda) I actually got the name from FF8 but he was actually based on link. I got a lot of influence from Kingdom Hearts as well.

Sharkarm: Which Zelda are you talking about to clarify?
JaJitsu: When I was little I always watched my sister play games and once she played Ocarina of Time, which is not my favorite personally, but had a lot of influence. As of right now Majora's Mask is my favorite Zelda.

Sharkarm: Right on. So do you want to tell us about what game or games you are working on now?
JaJitsu: Well I'm still working on Jables's Adventure, which I'm about over halfway done, and I've started two other games. One is an RPG called "Critical Hit!". That one, I'm working on with Kale [Kramlack] the other Ein is making me keep secret for now he doesn't want to hype it up.








( "Critical Hit!" || Art by Kramlack)

Sharkarm: Can you tell us about Jables Adventure? Give us a little overview of it and talk a little bit about how you work on it. What influences what goes into the game, what order you do the art,coding, story, etc.?
JaJitsu: Well, like I said, my oldest character is Zell but since I'm so attached to him I didn't want him to star in my first game. I knew it would be really small and not coded very well so I just made a new character who turned into Jables. At first it had no plot and I was just trying to make some fun little game. Squiddy wasn't even there at the time but then I got a random idea to have a squid gun on top of Jables's head, which would shoot ink balls, but squiddy became much cooler than just a gun and became that character who pushed Jables into actually going on his adventure. I usually create the maps first before all the coding. I'm really noob at mmf2 and my codes are horrible... but they seem to work for now.

Sharkarm: Would you say the story is influenced by the art or the story guides the art that you make for it? Do you have a story or is it made up on the fly?
JaJitsu : Haha, well actually a lot is just made up as I go. My friend Ryan Pietz is a very talented writer and he helps me a lot with story he came up with the idea of Squiddy randomly making Jables the hero. Usually when I get ideas for story, characters, or dialogue I send it his way and he finalizes everything. Since I'm not a very good writer it's nice to have him helping out.

Sharkarm: So I know you are working with a musician, can you tell us a little about how you came to get that particular composer working with you and a little about the process of how you communicate about the songs you need or how they should sound?
JaJitsu: Originally I had no musician, which kind of sucked so in the devlog [on tigsource] I put up that I needed someone to make music for my game and then I got an email [from Kevin Carville] saying the project looked like a winner and he would like to help out. He's a member of TIG and good friends with the Hyperduck company. When Kevin asked what kind of music I was looking for I told him that 8 bit sort of sound. Kind of like Cave Story ; P . Then a bit later he sent me the file which is the main theme when Jables is outside. I really loved the tune.


Sharkarm: So do you give him instructions for the songs or does he just send you sweet jams?
JaJitsu: The only thing I tell him is the areas the music will be played in. Then he goes off and somehow makes this amazing tune.

Sharkarm: Whats the most important lesson you've learned while making Jables?
JaJitsu: Really work on a good system before you start a game. I'm halfway through the game and thinking "damn, now I know how to do that differently", but that is okay I guess. That was the point of making Jables , a fun little learning experience.

Sharkarm: Yeah, definitely. Anything particularly funny or interesting happen to you during the making of Jables?
JaJitsu: Well before I even started Jables I was just fooling around with coding. I was trying to make an enemy walk around but somehow Jables was able to stand on his head (the enemy was just a zombie version of Jables). I still have a video on my cell phone of Jables riding on the zombie's head.

Sharkarm: That sounds great, maybe a little easter egg for the final game.
JaJitsu: haha, maybe but now its not much of a secret ;) Oh, another funny thing about Jables is how I got the idea to use fruit for the hp boosts. Cause I had fruit punch heal Jables and I couldn't think of the boost so I asked my mom. And like a mom, she said fruits and veggies but it was perfect to use fruit to play with the fruit punch idea. That's how I ended up with fruit, cause of my mom...




Sharkarm: Haha nice, I should ask my mom about game design choices more often.
JaJitsu: You can title the whole interview "Jajitsu's mom better game designer than him".

SharkArm: Going back to your characters real quick, do you design a character and use it in lots of places, like you keep the character going through different things?

JaJitsu: Well Jables I actually drew everywhere, like every time I doodled in class; he even appeared on my shoes. He wasn't even Jables back then. I don't really use the same character for everything but sometimes I just draw them a lot. I love designing characters the most out of everything I do. Backgrounds and props aren't really my thing but I love characters.

Sharkarm: Are there are any great indie games you've been playing lately?
JaJitsu: I have yet to buy Noitu Love 2, I really need to play that. The last game I played was Bonesaw but then my computer crashed and I never got to finish :( .

Sharkarm: Cool. Yeah, I highly recommend Noitu Love 2. Well, thanks for doing the interview. I hope to get to play Jables's Adventures soon!
JaJitsu: I hope to finish it soon, haha. Thanks for interviewing me.

You can check out JaJitsu's development blog for Jables's Adventure over at tigsource: http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=7540.0
and his personal website and blog at: www.jajitsu.com
Stay tuned for more interviews coming shortly.

Slime Cave Entrance

We are really really close to having a demo testing version ready. We just need to do a bit more level editing and add in a few more cutscenes (and one boss).

Here is the entrance to the slime cave along with a small new tileset which consits of grass that looks like it is covered a little bit in slime that you see leading up to the entrance of the cave.



We actually have a ton of new stuff since the last update. Brand new enemies and fun stuff for the slime cave, so I might post them up in the future. We will be finishing up the slime cave level editing and then adding in the slime boss real soon. More updates to come!

Companion Menu

Finally got around to adding in the companion menu system. We wanted it to look like an actual system that Jack would use to log the different creatures he finds, so we made it look like a notebook with sketch-like drawings of the different animals.
I'm really happy with how this turned out, especially because I have been dreading making it for awhile now. It turned out that it only took about 3 hours to code into the game and everything worked perfectly according to plan the first time. That's not a common occurrence! It was also nice coding something new into the game, since I've been doing a ton of tweaking for a very long time now.

We are also thinking about adding a log of all creatures, in addition to your companions, to encourage the player to explore more and try to find all the creatures in the game. For now though, we will have to put this idea aside and focus on the core gameplay, additional features can come later if we still have the time. Because if we work on a game with zero pay for too long, we may end up finishing it inside a refrigerator box along the street somewhere, and I don't know how long my computer is going to last if it's plugged into a cardboard cutout of a power outlet.

We also (mostly) finished the first boss in the grasslands. I spent a lot of time, and still am, tweaking his moves and stats and that type of thing. At the moment he is still way too hard for people who seem to not be me, because I get way too good at the game from all the testing I have to do. So I need to make sure the boss is not too hard but still provides a challenge for the player. I wish there was some way I could get really bad at the game. Maybe I'll slam my fingers in a door or something.

Getting very excited about level design again. I added in a few new sections yesterday and am just about ready to start work on some different areas. We should be working more on the slime cave in the next coming days, as soon as nate puts together the tile set. The first dungeon should be coming up very soon too, and most of the tilesets are already complete for that area. All I need is to add in a little bit more level designing and some cut scenes and the beta test demo should be ready to send out to those of you who would like to play it and give us some feedback.

Our current goal is to get the demo ready by the end of the month, so I think now would be good time to start to take some signups for beta testing. If you would like to do some testing and haven't told us yet, make sure to leave a comment or send us an email at team@sharkarmstudios.com.

Semester Ends, Time to Really Get Some Work Done

We were forced to take some time off from working on the game the last 2 weeks due to the semester ending. We had to focus most of our time on finshing up projects and taking tests and that kind of boring stuff. I wasted about 3 full days working on a 'Toll Booth' programming project in java for one of my computer science classes. The worst part about doing programming projects for classes is that you have to put a ton of work into it, and then when you are finished, you don't even have something cool. You just have some stupid worthless program that isn't even fun for anybody. But it may come in handy if I'm able to somehow fulfill my wildest dreams of becoming a toll booth operator (the ability to open and close a little gate, I can feel the power surging through my body just thinking about it.)

We were able to sneak in a few hours of working on the game though, and there are still some updates that I haven't talked about yet since the last post.

The coolest update is probably the new ability for Elkwood. We have given him about 4 different powers now, but keep changing which one we want him to have. Since he is a main character and you get him near the begining of the game, we want to make sure his ability is useful, but not too powerful. He is now able to make the player dash, by pulling on his shirt. This gives the player a short boost of speed and also allows him to dash-jump, so he can jump farther distances.

And, you do an awesome flip whenever you dash-jump.

The other abilities that we had Elkwood doing before will most likely go to other companions that you will get later in the game.

I also just finished the story document that is the closest thing to a design document that we have so far. I wanted to write out in detail all of the scenes and everything that needs to be known to fully understand the story. I'm glad that I'm finally finished writing it, it was drug out for about a month (and it's only about 14 pages long.) I don't really like writing this stuff down too much because we like to have the game sort of develop itself as we go along. At least now we have the main points written down and other people (such as a musician) might be able to get the idea of what we envision the game to be.

Did some more level editing too. Going to be working on a different section soon, hopefully, and most likely they won't take as long.

Fixed up and finished most of the cutscenes for the starting part of the game. I spent a lot of my time tweaking and trying to get them to look exactly as we envisioned them. It takes surprisingly a lot of time to do this though, but it will be well worth it. We still haven't come up with a good starting intro cutscene for the game. I spent a couple of hours making one before, but didn't like it, so we decided to axe it completely and start over.

Here is a shot of one of the scenes. It also shows the new text system with a new font that nate made (a few fixes have been made in the font since this screenshot.)


So now we are on break so we will hopefully be able to make a ton of progress on the game. Next up to work on is the companion menu system which will allow you to equip/unequip different companions. We are also about to add in the first boss soon. Really soon. Like I am just about to start working on him after I finish this blog post.

And that means that we are going to want some testers to do a run through of what we have of the game so far. I mainly want to make sure that the game runs well on other computers, as well as get feedback on what other people think about it so far. So get your testing fingers ready!

The Law is Against Us

So we got locked out of the building that we have our studio in one day when we were trying to work on the game. Apparently it was Thanksgiving and people don't go in to work that day or something stupid like that (but apparently the guy who walks around with the key and locks people out of buildings was there bright and early that morning.) It wouldn't have been that big of a deal but we were working late the night before and left our computers and all of our stuff there that we needed. And even that wouldn' t have been that bad but we also accidentally left a space heater, which was very very old and not-safe looking, on the night before, and didn't realize it till we got home. And I mean, that heater was old, it looked like it may have been the same space heater Abraham Lincoln used to heat up his room when he was writing the Gettysburg Address, and the power cable gets so hot that we usually have to wear gloves to unplug it. So we were kinda scared that the place might burn down and tried to get in there early the next morning in order to save the studio from burning down, and more importantly, the harddrives which contain all our work on the game. So we had to get a police officer to let us in the building, to take armfuls of computer equipment. He was suspicious of us 'long-hair hippies' the whole time, he kept his one hand on his batton.

Ok so back to the game. I've been working on the next section of the Grasslands, which is going to be a lot longer than the first part, with a lot more variety of enemies and landscape. We also decided to add an optional 'Slime Cave' which will be infested with slime monsters and even a giant slime boss:

He's some sort of big bear creature covered in slime with a fish, birds, and some other creatures stuck inside of him too. We want to make him have sort of a split personality with the fish, being wild and only wanting to kill, and the bear, being more calm.

I also recorded a timelapse video of me making some of the grasslands sections with my level editor:


There is also a section in the middle where Nate and I take a break to play Block Towers, the awesome game by JLJac.

Also, added in the ability for Elkwood:

He has a spins around the player like a shield and can defend against the attack. There will be a better animation soon, the current one is a place holder.