The final days of Mech Jam II were jam (hehe) packed for me, hence the lack of day-by-day breakdown ;) Let’s rectify that somewhat now that my entry is officially submitted!


In the final days I started by populating the small bunker intro zone, which was designed to be story focused with some broken down and weak mechs - the crawler & hopper variants (unfortunately ran out of time before implementing the wee story/intro animation)

I linked each of the different zones via trigger bounds which the player must reach to progress. While in a mech they have a large green arrow pointing to the next progression trigger to help them along.

The last few hours of the jam were focused on the ocean zone & boat mech. I really didn’t want to cut this feature as I think it was a very good example of the design possibilities for a co-op mech puzzle platformer game. Due to this the boat is quite janky (especially in multiplayer) however I’m still glad some iteration of this idea made it in.

However because of the focus on the boat mech I had to cut the final lush forest zone with its planned jumping/swinging spider mechs. I think this could have been a really fun zone! Instead I just used my old debug/testing scene and polished it up into a bit more of a sandbox playground as a reward for completing the other 4 zones.

Also thanks to some early playtests by friends in Biome Collective & the Mech Jam discord I knew I was going to need some proper options for mouse sensitivity & game volume. Along with control listings in the game to help new players figure out each mech as they progressed through the game. I am quite happy with the quick mech specific control UI I managed to throw together; which can be toggled between keyboard/controller input displays. (I also wanted them to pop up when entering a new mech but ran out of time)