elastic sword
projects | | linkz: Download Game | Soundtrack
Skills Practiced: C#, Digital Music Production
Tools Used: Otter2D, FL Studio
Project Duration: 2 Weeks
Project Focus: Fun / Jam
Elastic Sword is one of my larger jam games, featuring an entire custom soundtrack and multiple endings. It was written in spare time over the course of 2 weeks for Rainbow Jam 16, a gamejam hosted by members of the LGBT community and centered around the theme of personal identity. The main gameplay revolves around a central mechanic, the eponymous Elastic Sword; the player must move their character to swing the sword around themselves as the blade of the sword wobbles, stretches, and bounces around in response.
The player can collect diskettes and level up a variety of incredibly obtusely-named statistics which affect the handling of the sword in a multitude of ways - or, alternatively, they can refuse to do so.
The game’s story takes place in a distant future where society and humanity in general have entered an entirely digital form, and no longer resemble our own reality. The player is not initially aware of what their job as a “Cyberspace Cleanup Agent” exactly entails, but it soon becomes clear that all is not as it seems.
On a technical level, I spent a large portion of the development time of this game writing a lightweight cutscene script parser, so that I could rapidly iterate on the game’s interstitial scenes without having to hardcode character text and positions. This saved a ton of time, and let me focus on a variety of polishing touches that make this game one of my favourite pieces.
The electic and bizarre soundtrack was also my first attempt at making a full soundtrack to a small game; I am by no means a competent composer, but I am particularly proud of the way the music matches the surreal reality of the game, particularly my track about how to fry eggs.
