The Mariverse
The Mariverse
The Mariverse
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Jay Miles
Author - Narrative Designer - Game Developer
Shrwuhamfrlujettication
Shwuhamfrlujettication (or 'Shwuham' for short) is a incredibly short typing game where the main objective is to type the name of the game.
This game was made for 8 Bits to Infinity's Speedrun Jam, with the theme 'Nature' while using the 'Revised Music' diversifier.
I made this game on my own and it took me no less than 3 days to make the game.
My Development
The very second I saw the jam title, I immediately thought of making a very quick game with the aim of completing a short task in an incredibly short time.
My biggest inspiration was the videos of speedrunning the intro of a cartoon show American Dad, from a game that's based on the show. as the intro has no gameplay but still people try to get form the start and end of the intro in a quick amount of time, that made me think of doing something similar and I ended up with the idea of typing a word for a short amount of time.
The word I ended up is a made-up word that is supposed to force players to move around the keyboard as well as second-guess or quickly forget certain placements of the word, this word being 'Shrwuhamfrlujettication'.
Programming
Programming the typing wasn't difficult. How I did it was by putting it in phases, where typing a letter correctly will go to the next phase. For example, in phase 1, if you type 'S', then you go onto phase 2, where you have to type 'H'; if you type it, you go onto phase 3, where you have to type 'R' and so on.
In addition, I also record errors. In every attempt, it starts at -23, typing anything on the keyboard will add 1 every time. The reason for -23 is that if the player only types the word with no mistakes, then the result will be 0.
Once the word is completed, the timer stops, and it displays the time of your attempt and how many errors you made.
(Early development testing of the typing script)
Making the Leaderboard
Being a Seedrun game, it was ideal to record and show off the different times player managed to get. To achieve this, I had to figure out how to make an Online Leaderboard.
Fortunately, I found a free-to-use Unity Package called Leaderboard Creator where you can make your own leaderboard. There are a couple of videos I watched to set it all up, and I managed to make a functioning leaderboard. after setting things up, I displayed it to show the player the current records and a way for them to submit their own score if they want to.
(Early development testing the leaderboard display and submitting scores.)
Visuals (2D Art)
With the programming side finished, I had to include the 'Nature' side of the theme, since I had the idea but didn't develop it until the start of the jam, I did not know what the theme was going to be, but whatever it was, I would just make background art based on that theme.
The theme being 'Nature, I went ahead to make different art pieces of nature. I ended up making 5 unique images and made it so that one of them appears in every attempt at random.
Hidden Mechanic
To make the game challenging, I had it so that when the game starts, there is a 3-second countdown and the player types upon 'Go!'.
However, the countdown is now 3 seconds.
This is because of a hidden mechanic where each number has its own timer, ranging between 0.5 to 3 seconds.
This is intentionally designed to mess with a speedrunner's attempt, as they have to wait before they type but might mess up if they type too early. Or take too long because they weren't ready for the sudden 'Go!' after '1'. creating a struggle that makes the game easy to play, but hard to master.
(Sprite assets of the countdown,
made by me.)