Thanks, I spent quite a few hours during this Jam watching gameplay videos trying to figure out how they managed to make the swarm of Pikmin flow so seamlessly, and control so well.
There's still a few small details I'm missing that I wanted to get in. Like it seems like there's some level of alertness, where sometimes they wait a little bit before following the player. But when your in combat, they almost seem to move faster than normal, to keep up with the players movements.
I'm planning on continuing to work on this game after the Jam. And for the size mechanics, my plans shifted throughout the development, so they might change more as I work on it.
Originally the plan was going to be mostly visual, It was some adaption to another game I'm planning to work on later.
Where instead of instead of delivering the ship parts to the Dolphin. I was originally planning that the player would be playing on a level inside of a space ship, and would collect some progress mcguffins (not sure what exactly yet), to feed a slime girl that would grow bigger with time as she absorbs more of the ship. I wanted to design the level to where the player could see the giantess all the way throughout.
This is a quick terrible sketch I showed a friend early on what I was thinking for reference. I figured with some camera tricks to make the perspective work, it could look really good.
But the problem was it was looking like a pretty linear level, and just a level, not really something I could make into a full game if I wanted to keep going with it. And I think the important part of Pikmin is that open multi tasking aspect. I think Pikmin 4 coined the word Dandori for it. I still haven't played 4 yet, but I've been seeing the dandori issue memes.
There was a good GDC talk Cursed Problems in Game Design that seemed to apply here, so I decided to drop that previous idea for now. Later when I was working on some basic enemy AI, that I disabled for this jam release. It kinda just hit me and It seemed obvious. all the enemies are larger than you, and crush and eat your pikmin. So it just seems like finding enough unique ways to make that fun. There's one I'm undecided on if I'm going to add because I'm not into WG so much, but the Wollyhop would be a really good fit for that.