Day 1:

I started brainstorming, and liked the idea of making a game that’s very chill in your base, then you go outside and the music ramps up and everything is chaos.  The theme, “Risk it for the biscuit” fits nicely since the “outside” part of it will be risky.  I want it to be an incremental game.  Like always, turn-based not real time.  So the idea of trying to run a blockade around your planet makes sense.  Each time you fail you’ll get a bunch of resources, enough to make a better ship and get further until you’re finally out.  Originally this morning it was going to be a deck builder, but that seemed way too complicated, and there probably wouldn’t be many “builds” that would be viable, so it’s just normal upgrades with extra steps.  I settled on giving the user different goals like hitting enemy ships or collecting resources to make them decide what they need more carefully.  Then in the end game they’ll have a couple random powers that are more powerful giving them a bit of a “build” without letting them always pick the same one.

Personal goals: Make the game feel good.  I didn’t have much time for sound or visual “juice” on the last project, so hopefully I can go all out this time.

Started with basic movement.  Wanted to do a hex grid, but didn’t like how the test art was working out, so went for a diagonal grid instead.  I think it fits nicely, making the user always go up without it feeling as “off” as going diagonally up on a normal square grid.  I made a modular system for designing moves, so that should be super easy to add more later in development.  I mainly need collision, tractor beams, and pickups after this.  Also did some art until late in the night.  Basic player, pickups, some ui bits, and a couple enemies for starters.

Day 2:

The main goal for the day was to make enemies and objects work.  Which (apart from killing the player) they do now!  I wanted to setup world generation so I could actually play test, but that didn’t happen.  So I’m still not sure if the game will be fun, or too easy or too hard.  I want the enemies to be placed in a consistent relation to each other, not full random so they can have normal traps that they setup.  Otherwise it might be too easy or nonsensical.  So in trying to work out what that would look like, I had to come up with all the enemies and know how they’d work together and when to introduce them.  In doing that exercise I realized that most of the enemies aren’t very fun.  The best ones were the final ones that wouldn’t be there until the end.  Which is the worst case with a game jam.  If it’s boring to start with you might as well not have an end game.  So I re-designed half the enemies and got rid of the worst couple ideas I had.  The rest of the work today, adding slight polish, fixing the camera, creating particle systems, setting up world boundaries, was fairly easy.  Just time consuming.  Generally I get decision paralysis when designing systems like move and enemy storage.  This time I just went for it. I initially made resources for each enemy type, then realized that I needed more so I made them scenes of a shared type.  It’s nice to get it done even if it’s wrong first, letting me move on even if I have to come back.  Hopefully I get better at it.  The juice is starting, which feels great.  However, I get side-tracked tweaking the player movement or particle systems.

Main goals for tomorrow:  Get primary loop done, enemies, turns, death, restart.

(Trust me bro, it looks better with the particles actually moving.  Also the ship has fire when it flies now)

Day 3:

Long day, but good.  Started by getting monster spawning done.  The main goal is being able to play the game so I know if I need to redesign enemies or anything.  That didn’t quite happen, but oh well.  Once enemies were spawning, I realized most of the “goal” of the game is efficiency and feeling stronger, not actually dying to enemies.  So in order to “feel” that part of the game, I’d also need pickups, move limits, fuel, turns, and upgrades.  I got almost done with all that except fuel.  So now, I just need to polish that off and make it so the player jumps between the upgrade and run screens.  Once all that’s done I can finally play for a bit and see if the enemies are working or not.

I’m starting to feel like the art will be a massive ask, but I already have most of the game play done.  So I should have time to do art in between balance testing and game play updates.  I’m not sure if the theorized quest system will work or not either.  I might scrap it and just have the player try and reach a target height, then a cube mother spawns, that they have to destroy which ends that run but grants them more fuel and maybe an upgraded ability if I can make that work.

Goals for tomorrow: Fuel, death states inside the runs, prices for purchasing upgrades, scene transitions.

Day 4:

Got fuel, death states, prices, scenes, levels, all done! I also had time to start chipping away at the endless amounts of art that needs to be done.  There’s still a ton more to do, but it’s a good start.  The game is finally fully playable, just not even close to balanced or clear.  The highlight was that my friend E was able to play test it.  She gave tons of good advice and helped me see what is intuitive and what is obtuse in the current system.  Lots of good changes are coming tomorrow, hopefully the start of the “juice” that will make the systems more obvious.  At this point I’m over half way done with the jam.  I’m proud that I managed to make a functional game by the halfway point.  This is normally when I plan to be able to play my game, but it never turns out that way.  Having three days to fix things should be enough to put at least one coat of polish on everything.  Things like enemy balancing and world gen will come with time too, but I want to get everything a little more “done” before dedicating more time to that.

Goals for tomorrow, start doing the pile of animations that need doing, and get a solid UI style so it stops looking so awful.

Day 5:

Starting this dev log off with a bit about my working hours.  So far, for five days straight I get up around 4:30, feed the dog, and go back to sleep.  Then I wake up properly around 7-8am and work all day with maybe 2 to 3 hours of down time till 11:30.  That gives me roughly 13 hours of work a day.  The lack of sleep and constant thinking is finally getting to me.  Normally I feel tired around 10:30, today I was struggling around 8.  All that to say, take care of yourself better than I take care of myself.

Starting today I was very nervous.  I had tons of art to do and only three days to do it.  I’m better at estimating how long programming will take because I’m better at it, art can balloon to take way more time than I anticipate. Now that the day is over though, I’m feeling good about what I got done.  I made all the art for the main game screen, the upgrade screen and took a stab at the main menu.  There’s still lots of little things to do, but I don’t feel like it’s insurmountable.  The game also feels much better with the small animations I was able to add for fuel and items.  I chipped away at a couple of the ~10 fixes and suggestions that E brought up yesterday.  I still need to do a few changes to the enemies to make them easier to understand and more fun to play against.  Then I need to do a major balance patch for the world generation.  If I manage both of those, I need to add quests so people know what to do and maybe some tutorial screens.  I wanted a playable tutorial, but that’s unlikely at this point.

Day 6:

I managed to do lots of final fixes now that the art is mostly done.  The main goal was re-doing game balance and enemies.  So far I’ve swapped out more than half of the original enemies, and all of the other ones have been modified.  It just goes to show, play test often and early.  Once I got the enemies and spawning working, I shifted to the progression system.  I made scrap useful, unlocking more fuel, and added conversions to diamonds for the other materials.  I got the story scenes created and hooked up to the main menu.  I made it so once you beat the fourth level the game is over and returns to the main menu.  I also set it up so there’s a nice transition screen between all the different scenes.  I also added the “quests” which are more just gentle suggestions.  They just tell you what to do so you can progress easier.  I think it will really help new players on-board easier.  Now that all that’s done, the main things I need to do tomorrow are create the credits and options screens, some extra animations, and all of the sounds.  I’m not sure if it’s possible, but I’ll try.

Day 7:

The list of bug fixes and small tweaks goes on and on.  I finally feel like I finished everything that was super important.  There’s tons of small things that could make it better, but you have to stop sometime, and I really want to sleep.  I submitted my game minutes ago and I’m still reeling trying to remember if I’m forgetting anything.  E was a huge help with tons of suggestions and fixes for mechanics.  I can’t stress how important it is to have others play your game and listen to their feedback.  I got all the different screens set up for options and credits.  I made all the sound effects and found some good music.  I’m always surprised how much better a game is with sound effects.  Everything just feels better.  I had some wild bugs, like my code to remove enemies after they’re off the screen didn’t work, so the game would take forever to generate long levels.  There were lots of issues where if you clicked at the wrong spot at the wrong time transitions or animations would break.  Overall the code is a disaster, there’s no saving it honestly.  I did manage to get through four or five days while trying to write good code, but at the end I just shoved extra lines and updates wherever they’d probably work.  If I want to keep working on this, which I’m not sure it’s worth, I’d totally start over from scratch.  Overall it was a fun week.  Every time I do this I get better at judging how long things will take, and managing my workflow.  Sorry for the very ramble-y postmortem, but my brain is mush.

Huge thanks to E for her help.  I hope everyone else had a good time making their projects too.