Many ideas and discussions later; We decided to turn the game into a 2D platformer. After assigning roles and tasks to people we got straight to work. My main focus was art and design, Joxer was the lead programmer, but I'd help out where I could and Gus was the story and level designer. Together we started creating what we thought would be a relatively easy game to make.
Booooy were we mistaken! Don't get me wrong; the foundation of the game was great, a lot of things were established and we were ready for smooth sailing. The first couple of weeks were great, we managed to accomplish quite a lot. One thing we didn't really account for was time. Time was one thing the other members didn't have, Joxer had full time job and a baby to look after whereas Gus was busy after his full time job as well. This caused progress on the game to slow down, so after several weeks of work we ended up with a few working mechanics and not much of a level to play on.
What we ended up prototyping was a basic puzzle platformer. Well, mainly we worked on the mechanics of it only.
The push and pull mechanic was a basic idea that a lot of puzzle games had and we thought that it would be a great fit for our game. Some of the hardest thing to do was to make the object movable, enable the gravity of the object when detached from the player and attach it to the player when the player interacted with it via a button press. But we solved them eventually, for example we attached a hinge joint to the player so that when the player interacted with a push/pull object - the object would then just attach to that hinge.
Alongside that we developed a test level where we could test out the mechanics.
I also got greedy! I didn't work a full time job, so I had some extra time to work on the game. I enjoyed developing the game way too much, I loved the idea and concept, so I took on all the other roles to further progress the game. Of course the other members still helped out where and when they could.
At this point into the project I was very eager to work on the project at a faster pace. But I knew the project would be to big to handle on my own and didn't want to leave the team behind. So I did what I do best; pivot.