• Hey Guest! Ever feel like entering a Game Jam, but the time limit is always too much pressure? We get it... You lead a hectic life and dedicating 3 whole days to make a game just doesn't work for you! So, why not enter the GMC SLOW JAM? Take your time! Kick back and make your game over 4 months! Interested? Then just click here!

GMC Jam Games The Frozen GMC Jam 43 | Games Topic

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Alice

Darts addict
Forum Staff
Moderator



Games Topic

THEME:
ELEMENTS

OPENS
Tuesday 30th Nov, 2020 12:00-ish UTC

DEADLINE
Tuesday 7th Dec, 2020 15:30 UTC

Temporary License for the Jam
https://accounts.yoyogames.com/promo/gmcjam43
Just click the link, make sure you are logged-in to YYG and you'll have a temp export license for the jam!





  • Any GMC member can take part in the GMC Jam. You must use GameMaker to create your game. Free temporary export licenses will be available for all users for the duration of the jam.
  • Games must be made between 12:00 UTC on 30th Nov and 12:00 UTC on 7th Dec, and posted in the games topic.
  • You may use resources such as graphics, sounds and scripts that were made prior to the jam, as long as the bulk of your work takes place during Jam weekend.
  • The credits should make clear where the assets come from and which were made before the Jam; The creators of the entry must have rights to all of the assets; unlicensed use of resources is not allowed. (This rule is enforced, failure to follow this rule will result in not being eligible for a medal and final score being affected)
  • You may create one post per entry in the games topic. You may create this post before your game is finished and continue editing that post to update your progress, in fact you are encouraged to write a devlog!
  • All entries must have a download link in the Games Topic before it closes at 12:00 UTC on 7th Dec.
  • All entries should work on Windows as a standalone executable / compressed zip folder. No installers please. Your entry can also work in HTML5 and on other platforms, but most voters will be using Windows and therefore your entry should work primarily on windows in order to secure a decent amount of feedback.
  • All entries are encouraged to follow the Jam theme. It isn't mandatory to do so, but you'll often get more favourable reviews from your peers!
  • You may participate alone or in a team of up to 3 members. See the "teams" section below if you're looking for teammates.
That's all you need to know, but more information will be available in the Games Topic when it opens and in the rules discussion topic.

Recommended post format:

Game Title
Developer Name / Team Name
DOWNLOAD LINK (when finished)

- maybe a screenshot here -

- your devlog here -

You can keep editing your post to write a devlog about your game.
You can also post in the discussion topic as you develop your game.
Do not post more than one post per game in the games topic.

Suggestions - please read!

Some things to note when you're developing your entry:​

  • Make sure to explain the controls and mechanics of the game. If you can't introduce mechanics in the game itself, make a README.txt file with explanations instead - Jam Player will detect it automatically
    Note: If the file is essential to understanding the game, call it "README PLEASE".
  • PLEASE, optimize the file size of your game. This is a four day game jam, you don't need 500MB of .wav audio files bulking out your project. Make sure you set your music files to "compressed" in the sound editor in GameMaker, and we'll all be happy.
  • Make your Games Topic post pretty! Some reviewers may simply pick the most interesting games from this topic instead of playing every single entry. Spare some time in your jam schedule to make your post here look attractive.
  • The two consistently most reliable file hosts for uploading your game are itch.io and Google Drive. But PLEASE remember to set your game to PUBLIC before the deadline. We have had plenty of cases in the past where people miss out on early votes because they forget to make their game public!
 
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Alice

Darts addict
Forum Staff
Moderator
@Alice, @Siolfor the Jackal and @Yozoraki present...

~ Voidling ~
A platformer with puzzle elements



DOWNLOAD

Day 1
(A) 12:00 UTC - Aaand the theme is... Elements, maybe? I wouldn't know, because EvanSki is yet to make an announcement or post the theme reveal video...
... oh well, guess I'll make the Games Topic now. Maybe if I'm quick I'll post there first. ^^'

(A) 15:10 UTC - Finally, Mightyjor confirmed that the theme is ELEMENTS. Not much surprise, our team might or might not have had some ideas already.
To avoid the stale fire/water/earth/air combination, we decided to incorporate the theme by making a platformer with puzzle elements. We can hardly go more elementary than that!

(A) 17:00 UTC - With theme known, the only unresolved matter was temporary license for Jam participant. Thank goodness, and even moreso thank Ross Manthorp for responding to the call for temporary licenses so quickly (within an hour and a half)! Now with Jam organisation matters taken care of I can proceed to the Jam itself...
...except I need to get back home first. Well, after that I shouldn't have any major detours, I hope.

(A) 19:00 UTC - I can finally get started on the Jam entry! I already had prepared the Jamstarter, so that's at least the basic utilities taken care of. Now to remember how to make platforming mechanics.
I'll be using the brand new 2.3.7 release. You see, I also like to live dangerously. That, and I hope potential any annoyances of the new release will be compensated by shiny new nullish operators (I no longer need to use the coalesce workaround method!).

(A) 22:30 UTC - It moves!



Though sometimes it moves where I don't want it to. Well, I will figure that out sometime later, I need to get some rest for now.
You may notice some inspirations from Thomas Was Alone, which also happened to be a platformer with puzzle elements. Though it might take a while before I will be able to properly imitate its artstyle, so maybe I'll opt for something other than jumping rectangles. Just a thought.

No coyotes were harmed when implementing this platforming movement. If anything, they are protected now!

Day 2
(A) 7:30 UTC Another day, another jam changes to make. I fixed the "getting stuck in the corner" bug.
As it turned out, the function that calculated the remaining vertical space I can move upwards, instead of returning 0 ("the character touches the ceiling, don't move any further") I made it return the original offset parameter ("sure, you can move N pixels up all the way, there's no wall in the way"). The joys of gamedev...

(A) 8:20 UTC A power out(r)age! It means no Internet for me, but at least I can still work on laptop. Maybe I'll be able to wait it out while adding another functionality...

(A) 8:50 UTC I managed to implement another platforming quality of life feature - this time it's sliding around the block corners when jumping. So e.g. if only two pixels of character width are below the block, then the character instead of bouncing off the ceiling will move slightly to align with the block. This mechanic goes as far back as Super Mario Bros, and is a fine example of game oil as described here (compare that with game juice). I haven't added ledge-reaching, maybe some other time.
Meanwhile, I'll keep taking delight whenever a debug message indicates that one of quality of life features was actually applied during regular testing, be it coyote time (most frequent), jump input buffering or the newly added ceiling sliding.
...except I won't be taking delight much, because my laptop's battery is about to run out and the power isn't back yet. Time to do some cleaning, I guess...

(A) 9:50 UTC Just as I was about to send a leave-on-request notice to my workplace because of no electricity, the power came back. The upside is that I won't need to use up my leave-on-request day. The downside is that I'll actually need to spend time working rather than making the Jam entry. Oh well, there are still more days later.

(A) 11:30 UTC During one lengthy build or another I still find time to do some Jam entry coordination. I even made a quick sketch of the intended design of the titular voidling:



(there was also a roughly coloured version to give an idea which sections have which colours, but it makes the outline less visible so I posted the cleaner one)

(A/Y) 12:30 UTC Yozoraki made a sprite for the Voidling. We might still need to separate it into parts, but it gives the general idea still.

(A/S) 13:10 UTC And now it turns out the track for the first area was composed already! It still needed some tweaking (one instrument was louder than others), but it's still quite a nice bit of progress.

(A) 17:50 UTC Throughout the day there were still some bits of brainstorming here and there, and also some work to be done... at work. But that was the last workday, now it's all vacation days for the rest of the Jam!
On the one hand it may be a bit excessive to actually use all that extra Jam time so much, on the other hand some other participants might not even need to work at all, on the third hand those who do work might as well developed a skillset to use the time more efficiently...
...somewhat ironic that the very work that teaches me to develop programs more efficiently is the same one that makes me spend large amounts of time on it. I get paid, though, so I don't complain.

(A) 19:50 UTC Before getting to programming I decided to start a game design document to outline some more specific ideas, and there are quite a few ideas to be written down. The combinatorics don't work in our favour, but if we do pull off at least half of what we have planned, it's going to be majestic.

(A/S) 20:20 UTC Siolfor made track for another area. At this rate we should have all the core soundtracks done with a few days to spare!

(A) 21:40 UTC Tried implementing mechanics for moving between rooms, not yet finished. Just going to take a quick rest, and I'll get back to it-

Day 3
(A) 7:20 UTC Aaaand I went full asleep mode. Was it that cream soup I ate before? Well, at least I got a decent amount of sleep, I guess?
Back to work on the room connection mechanics, I guess? I plan to use my regular method of creating room transition elements with target room object variables - I even made some basic setup towards that - but it's more complex here because if possible I would like to carry over the main character platforming state (so if I e.g. leave the room jumping, I'd appear in the next room also jumping).
Though maybe I should eat some breakfast first...

(A) 11:40 UTC Somehow along the way, I happened to fix a small bug with ceil-sliding mechanic (I described this mechanic in day 2).
Also, I added the variable jump height, because it annoyed me how high the player would go with just the slight touch of the jump key. For the time being I made it so that the player either makes a half-jump or a full-jump - nothing inbetween. Both can be performed reliably, one by pressing the jump key for less than ~8/60 second, the other by holding the jump key all the way. So adding in-between jump heights shouldn't be an issue - I plan to unlock these in the end - but at the level design phase I want to make sure the game can be reasonably completed with only those two kinds of jumps.

(A) 16:20 UTC Finally done with the switching between rooms! Between my overthinking and some distractions it took me way longer than I'd have, but at least now it's functional and, hopefully, pretty low maintenance.
To give some context, I implement my platforming mechanics using finite state machine approach. So I have states for standing on ground, rising, falling etc. and since I need to only consider one state at a time and the nearby states it can turn into (e.g. falling can turn into on-ground), I hopefully manage to avoid the mammoth serving of spaghetti my platforming code would otherwise become (now it's just a moderate serving).
So first, for transitions, I intended to add separate states for walking away, entering the room etc. I even started implementing this approach, but found it makes things like handling between-screen jumps a pain. So I eventually opted for a simpler yet more effective method - copy all the character variables into a structure, then on entering the next room position the character appropriately and continue whichever state the character was in.
Just to make sure the player's indecisiveness won't cause some oddities (e.g. spawning right in the middle of the correponding transition area, forcing returning to previous room right away), I also added the flag that forces the player to move in the direction of the other room once transition has begun (that was originally meant to be the role of the special walking away state).
Between-room transitions aside, I also made the checkpoints system; now whenever I step on checkpoint, it becomes the next spawning point after restart. At least there's that part done.

(A/S) 21:50 UTC Siolfor made the track for the third area; it's not his usual style, so it took way longer than the previous two. Still, for something outside of his comfort zone, it turned out quite nicely. ^^
If he keeps making these tracks so fast, I and Yozoraki won't be able to catch up with graphics and level design! And yet, I'm still hopeful it'll work out... for now.

(A) 24:50 UTC Have you ever player Within a Deep Forest? It has switching abilities mechanics like various other games, but since the switch can only happen at a checkpoint, it alleviates the problem of accounting for all possible abilities in level design (especially if the order of getting abilities is not linear). Smart design choice, there, and one I applied in our Jam entry as well.
With that said, I implemented the ability selection wheel. I have yet to implement actual abilities, but having this mechanic is a nice start and one UI-specific thing out of the way (well, not quite, I'll probably tweak it if I get some time). For this selection, I created a nice ListChoice con-struct-or which stores options available, keeps track of the currently selected index and allows scrolling back and forth, taking into account disabled items as well. I might as well share this here, maybe you'll find it useful for your games too!

GML:
function ListChoice(_choices, _index) constructor {
    choices = _choices;
    choice_count = array_length(choices);
    choices_enabled = array_create(choice_count, true);
    choice_index = _index;
    
    static get_choice = function() {
        return choices[choice_index];
    }
    
    static get_choice_at = function(_index) {
        return choices[_index];
    }
    
    static get_index = function() {
        return choice_index;
    }
    
    static choose_next = function() {
        repeat (choice_count) {
            choice_index = (choice_index + 1) mod choice_count;
            if (choices_enabled[choice_index])
                return;
        }
    }
    
    static choose_previous = function() {
        repeat (choice_count) {
            choice_index = (choice_index + choice_count - 1) mod choice_count;
            if (choices_enabled[choice_index])
                return;
        }
    }
    
    static disable_choice = function(_index) {
        choices_enabled[_index] = false;
    }

    static enable_choice = function(_index) {
        choices_enabled[_index] = true;
    }
    
    static is_choice_enabled = function(_index) {
        return choices_enabled[_index];
    }
}
Outside the ListChoice struct, I have selection wheel calling choose_previous() on pressing up/left and choose_next() on pressing right/down. I haven't included this in the struct itself, because different menus might use different set of controls. Besides, during winter time I'd better wear my SoCs.
Meanwhile, here is the selection wheel in action. I bet everyone always wanted to have Bubble Wrap ability in their platformer.



At any rate, it's about time I get some sleep. When the timer goes past 24th hour, it's usually a sign to stop working.

Day 4
(A) 1:30 UTC Not too long after I finished work for yesterday, Yozoraki posted a schematic of some area:



That reminds me, I'll need to implement water floating. There are still so many different gameplay mechanics to make. Platformers are complex, especially if one wants to make them decently responsive.

(A/Y) 8:30 UTC Another day, and still more features to make. But first I should probably eat some breakfast or something.
Meanwhile, Yozoraki setup a bunch of levels in one of the planned areas (I'd like to say "first area", but the game being a metroidvania the order of areas is pretty arbitrary). Since lots of mechanics aren't yet implemented, it's more of a sketch, but it's nice to see the game taking shape nonetheless.
Not too fond of the area being composed of small rectangular subsections - sometimes divided at pretty inconvenient spots - but that's a given until the mechanics of camera following the player are implemented. I think I know what I'll work on next...

(A) 12:50 UTC I finished the camera mechanic! Which usually shouldn't take as long as a few hours, but what I attempted wasn't trivial, either.
Considering how long I spent on it, one could expect I'd curse the new and strange camera system introduced in GM:S 2, but it was actually the opposite - I've grown to appreciate it a lot. Especially how easy it's to setup drawing a view to the user-defined surface rather than directly to the application one - vide view_set_surface_id(...) function for more details. I was wondering if maybe a surface associated with a view is its lifetime managed just like the application surface, but pressing Alt+Tab and going back quickly proved that the view-bound surfaces also need to be checked for whether they exist. Thankfully, recreating the surface as needed and associating the new surface with the view wasn't hard at all.

Now why would I want to have different views with different surfaces? Because I'm stubborn, that's why - and I wanted to have nice smooth transitions between one visual mode and another. You know, like dimension-switching. So when switching between one mode and another, views associated with both modes would be visible, and one would be drawn with specific alpha over another. Having to do that switch on instances level - especially with all the depth management - would be quite a chore and there would likely still be some alpha overlapping weirdness.

So yeah, views in the GM:S 2 are actually pretty awesome.

(A/S) 13:10 UTC Not long after I finished working on camera, Siolfor completed the fourth track! I better pick up my pace so that there's content to match it. Let me just tell you, this track is fire! šŸ”„
Somewhat fitting for the elements-themed Jam, I guess? Though I've yet to add the puzzle elements on my side. Hopefully, once I implement the special abilities, there'll be some nice platforming challenges options.
I'll start with the wall-jump one, since it seems like it'll be the most troublesome of all the abilities. But first, I'm going to take a self-maintenance break...

(A) 15:30 UTC 96 hours before the Jam ends...
The real Jam begins now!
(meanwhile, I'm still playing around with the wall-jump mechanics)

(A) 16:10 UTC Not too long after the real Jam starter, I finished with wall jumping for the time being. I don't like this nagging feeling that I don't quite know how this code works; usually I don't have this feeling, not so quickly at least. Still, it seems to function well enough, so onto the other abilities we go. There shouldn't be any especially troublesome platforming mechanic left by now...

(A) 19:10 UTC Oh, there very much were troublesome platforming mechanics left! So, one of the Steel Skin form traits is that it's heavier and that instead of floating underwater, it sinks as if not affected by water at all. Can you see the problem here?
...floating underwater.
The basics weren't overly complex - whenever the character mask overlaps with water, push them upwards proportionally to the part of character that's underwater. Alright, it's a little bit complex, but still perfectly doable with a bunch of simple arithmetics and min/max calls.

GML:
function intersection_part(_instance1, _instance2) {
    var _l1 = _instance1.bbox_left;
    var _t1 = _instance1.bbox_top;
    var _r1 = _l1 + _instance1.sprite_width;
    var _b1 = _t1 + _instance1.sprite_height;

    var _l2 = _instance2.bbox_left;
    var _t2 = _instance2.bbox_top;
    var _r2 = _l2 + _instance2.sprite_width;
    var _b2 = _t2 + _instance2.sprite_height;
    
    var _lmax = max(_l1, _l2);
    var _tmax = max(_t1, _t2);
    var _rmin = min(_r1, _r2);
    var _bmin = min(_b1, _b2);
    
    if (_lmax >= _rmin || _tmax >= _bmin)
        return 0;
    
    var _instance1_area = _instance1.sprite_width * _instance1.sprite_height;
    var _intersection_area = (_rmin - _lmax) * (_bmin - _tmax);
    return _intersection_area / _instance1_area;
}
So yeah, not something that would take hours to implement.
The intended behaviour was that after the character jumps into water, they're pushed upwards and then oscillate a little around the water surface before finally stabilising.
The "before finally stabilising" part was the tricky one. At first I hoped that all I need is always floor the vertical shift (calculated from vertical speed) towards zero and it would eventually work out. What I got instead was the character permanently oscillating around the water surface. I tried tweaking some parameters here and there, but all I got was different amplitude of the oscillation. Eventually, I took the character position into consideration - if they were underwater more than halfway through, I slowed down the upwards motion, otherwise I slowed down the downwards motion. After using this method, the character finally stabilises.



At the very least, jumping out of water wasn't too hard to implement, either, just making sure the character is at least partially above water before making the jump. Thanks to input buffering the player can make the jump slightly before the player rises above water, too!

(A) 22:40 UTC All abilities are implemented now; there are still some details yet to be done, but I'll take care of them once they become relevant.
Still, there are some core mechanics I haven't implemented yet. Might as well go ahead and finish them up.

(A) 25:00 UTC Really stretching the clock here...
Still, I'd say it's worth it considering I've implemented pretty much all of the remaining essential mechanics (ability collectibles, endgame collectibles, between-areas portals). So now I can rest easy-ish knowing that the most important level building blocks are already there. And we're only about halfway through the Jam.
I'll take my sleep now...

Day 5
(A/S) 4:30 UTC While I was sleeping, Siolfor posted yet another area track - metal this time, so Siolfor is in his element. But I can rest easy now, because I already made the system of connecting different areas - so adding more won't be that much of a problem.
If we exclude all the graphics and possibly area-specific features, but shhhh... I'm sleeping now. (and writing a devlog at the same time, apparently)

(A) 7:00 UTC Another day, still many things to do. I'll stay strong, nonetheless! Especially since there are more than 3 days of the Jam left.

(A) 9:00 UTC I implemented the texture-based walls drawing. To avoid overly repetitive terrain graphics, I decided not to use the same small sprite for all wall fragments. Instead, I'd have a larger looping texture (say, 256x256 compared to a 32x32 tile) and depending on its position the wall would draw a specific part of that texture. So the walls act as a clipping mask for the repeated texture, pretty much, as I've shown on this messily drawn explanatory picture.
I hope this will make backgrounds not so glaringly repetitive on the one hand, and not that difficult to make on the other.

(A/Y) 11:50 UTC Yozoraki made some texture graphics for different versions of one area. They still need to be vectorised, but they show promise. Meanwhile, I'm going to do some graphics programming, in particular backgrounds management and the player character animation. I can't wait for all of our work to finally start coming together...
 
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dadio

Potato Overlord
GMC Elder
KLIK DA ELEMENTS
a joint effort
by
dadio and GameDevDan

I'd like to thank my good buddy GameDevDan for painstakingly crafting the fine art and design in this one and for collaborating with me on such an Epic adventure. Thank you so much for the great work!
Love you, man!

NiU3rg5c.png


 
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SoapSud39

Member
**change of plans: I don't have much motivation to work on a game right now and there's no way I can either do my assignments around the game or make the game around my assignments (and I really don't want to do three long papers in four days next week, after being exhausted from a jam), so I'll sit this one out

I like the idea, so maybe I'll work on it another time

--------------
gonna make a game about boring old fire/water/earth/air

I stayed up doing homework, made this post, did more homework, discovered that the theme is in fact "elements", slept for a couple of hours, did more homework, went to class all day, etc.

But good thing I had an idea ready and written out.

The plan this time around is to make a Spelunky-like roguelike. The player is on a journey to climb the Tower of Babel, and they may make use of elemental powers to make their way through monsters, traps, and floating platforms to reach the top of the tower and discover its secrets.

That's all I will reveal for now (not because it's a secret, per se, but because I'm tired and don't have the mental faculty to explain everything without revealing too much).

but while we're at it -- enemy concept art:
enemy concept.jpg
four areas, five enemy types each, same-ish AI for each type, just a different skin
It's gonna be a pain animating all of these, but I'll do simple movements only so hopefully not too difficult.

I've got class tomorrow and a bit of homework to finish up before finals week, so I'll be back to the game later tomorrow (Wednesday).


I have some pretty big assignments to juggle with the jam, so I don't know whether I'll be able to get as much done as I want. I like the concept a lot though so I don't know. I might just do the game jam and leave all my schoolwork for later (as usual) or maybe I'll try to get some work done half the day and some game done the other half.

Luckily we have a week this time and Evanski gave us the additional 3.5 hours, so my game might unexpectedly turn out okay (or good?).


can't wait for winter break
 
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Alexx

Member

logo220.png

Santa Must Save Christmas
Team: Fast Forward >>>
DOWNLOAD LINK: https://www.easytoplaygames.com/_downloads/c8050a0b5d63e36ff899a7416e25a047


Screenshots:

Development Blog:
Initially spent some time discussing jam theme and what we could create.

In addition to the notes below, we also spent around 2-3 hours each day communicating and discussing the game.

Alexx:
Hour 1 - Made graphics text for title screen
Hour 2 - Decided on game mechanics and how to use the theme
Hour 3 - Sourcing game graphics, will make our own if time
Hour 4-5 Formatting images
Hour 6-7 Working on game mechanics
Hour 7 -8 Taking a break
Hour 8-9 Working on bonus level
Hour 9-12 Finished bonus level graphics and mechanics
End of day 1
Day 2:
Hour 1-4 Working on final level
Hour 5-6 Debugged final level && bonus level
Hour 7-8 Working on level 1 (platformer - I really don't enjoy making platformer games)
Hour 8-10 Working on second level for collecting presents
Hour 10-11 Tweaking and debugging second level
Hour 11-13 Making changes based on feedback from other team member
Hour 13-14 Added new audio that was created
End of day 2
Day 3:
Hour 1-4 Decided against platformer for level - Working a runner style level
Hour 5 Finished work in progress of runner level - Waiting on feedback from team member
Hour 6 Started on work for level 3 puzzle
Hour 7-10 Finished puzzle for level 3
Hour 11 Made screenshots and uploaded - uploaded demo
Hour 12 Fixed errors on level 5 and added hud
End of day 3
Day 4:
Hour 1-3 Tweaked audio and audio effects on all levels - audio audio effects from team member
Hour 4-6 Updated huds on 3 levels
Hour 6-7 played through whole game, tweaked difficulty so each level is challenging, but still fun and be completed in 2-3 tries. Uploaded new screenshots, update project download
Hour 8-present taking a break
Hour -11 Debugging code, fixing a memory leak - updated upload
Hour 12 Adding new audio provided by teammate
Day 5:
Hour 1-3 Somehow had an undefined compile error - redid all of yesterdays work :(
Hour 4 testing all levels - made a few changes to prevent sounds overlapping
Hour 5 Tidying up code, fixing some small errors
Hour 6 Played level 1 multiple times, correct a few issues
Hour 7 Created splash screen to set up variables
Hour 8 Finally came up with an aim of the game - you'll have to play it to see what it is!
Hour 9 Implemented the aim of the game - proud with myself on this :)
Hour 10-12 Playing all levels, adjusting level layout, settings, and speed increase of levels, audio controls on levels, and general code tweaking
Day 6:
Hour 1-3 Updating text for control info on each level
Hour 4 -5 Updated menu screen, managed to track down a small audio bug, updated screenshot
Hour 5 - Compressed audio caused a few delay issues, undone only 1MB extra
Hour 6-8 Various updated based on feedback from team member, changed some colour schemes, backgrounds, corrected a few audio issues.
Hour 9-11 Added some extra info graphics, changed controls on a couple of levels, more audio tweaking
Hour 12-14 Break
Hour 15 Made logo for team name
Day 7:
Less than 24 hours to go :)
Hour 1-3 Play testing. Added logo to splash screen
Hour 4-6 Took a break, various non-game-jam things taken care of.
Hour 10 Added final level music. Published game :)


LucasSchachtMusic :
Day 1:
Composing music for menu screen - Music and jingle composed
Day 2:
Composing music and jingles.
Generated some sound effects
Day 3:
Unable to work on project today
Day 4:
Sound design, composing music, adjusting sounds, play testing and bug report
Day 5:
Play testing, checking game for errors, discussing project, creating music and extra effects for game
Day 6:
Testing, finding minor issues for improvement, working on new colour scheme, created background image, made splash images for levels and some other awesome ideas to make the game better
Day 7:
End level music
 
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ELEMENTAL STATION

ZombieLawyer (aka North State Games)

DOWNLOAD LINK (HTML & Windows available)

A space station management game about collecting elements so you can expand a derelict space station.

Game will probably be about a space station and collecting elements in space?
Here's a screenshot of progress. You can walk either direction in a circle around the space station (graphics will need to be cleaned up, currently scaling up and it's chopping). You can also collect the credits, that you see to the right of the screen. You'll eventually use the credits to unlock parts of the space station. Think Startopia, with certain sections being in vacuum, so you need the right elements of oxygen, nitrogen, etc., to be able to access those other areas.
space_station_01.PNG
finally cleaned up the station. No more jagged edges.
station_loop_02.PNG
Finally, things are starting to look "pretty" have a rotating star background and a static one for some character. Also, there are now four "sections" to the space station and doors that seal them off, with proper collision too. Collision took awhile, as the rotating nature of the game had me scratching my head for a bit.

Last update for the first day. Now there is a menu that will pop up. Left/Right will allow you to move and remove the menu, with nothing being selected. Pressing up, which starts the menu, also allows you to cycle through choices. Pressing down, will make a selection. You can now pay to unlock the door to the next section of the space station.

Began coding the logic for the aliens/citizens that will visit your space station. Currently he just follows you around and will stop randomly (this is intentional). I've never coded AI that doesn't follow just a basic X/Y trajectory, there will definitely be tweaks that are needed for when to go which direction. It's passable for now.

*May not seem like much, but the AI "citizen" can now fully traverse the Torus and avoid doors to go the correct way based on whatever they're trying to get to.
*Citizens of the station can now pickup credits on their own. When the player walks "over" them, they will drop the credits for the player (like in the Kingdom games). Such good stewards of the station's money.
generator.PNG
Now when you open an airlocked door, if you step into the prior area, you will begin to lose oxygen. Lose too much oxygen and die. You can also now use the handy menu system to purchase an "Atmosphere Generator" that will clear that section and make it livable. There'll be a similar object that collects various elements based on different events.
*Cleaned up the space station graphics, so no overlap with new section and the exteriors. Also fixed a bug with the atmo generator where it wouldn't produce oxygen and was hovering over the player. Fixed some performance issues from drawing so many massive circles.
*Combat now exists. Citizens will shoot at enemies when close enough.

Lots of great stuff. You can now create the element collector (yay theme points!). It will deploy outside the Torus ring. Currently working on having the menu select which elements you collect and there will be various "clues" as to what elements are easiest to collect at any particular moment.

Also diligently worked on combat. Enemies can kill the player and Citizens of the station.

Oh man, it's starting to feel like a game. I had some great mechanics, enemies, ways to fight enemies, a world to explore, some danger. But there was nothing tying anything into the theme. I'm doomed to lose. Well, finally, the theme has been incorporated, and while I'm not sure it'll be a hit with others, I'm really, really happy with it.

The previous "background" is gone. It's pure blackness in the madness of space now. I now have the starbursts and moving stars as objects. This solves the bug I had, where the "background" stars would previously poke through my space station because the space station is really just a lot of draw_circle calls. Now the stars move behind the station. More importantly, the stars matter. In fact, the stars as the key to EVERYTHING in this game.

Eventually you will build your Element Collector. The little contraption attaches to the exterior of your space station and collects materials from whatever galaxy you're flying through. You have to set which materials it collects. You can collect hydrogen, oxygen, or iron (three abundant natural ELEMENTS). If the stars around your space station are white, set your collector to Hydrogen and begin to collect hydrogen, blue stars allow you to collect oxygen, and orange stars allow you to collect iron.

Credits will be going away. Now you will need to supply the Atmo Generators with oxygen to clear the other sections of the station. Iron will be the resource used for most building types, and hydrogen will be used to supply Citizens/Hire them.

So many new possibilities with the three element system. Now the real challenge will be how much new material to implement while also saving time to improve graphics and audio. I've already re-done the Doors that block each section of the station. Lots of placeholders still exist and my weakness has always been graphics.
elements.PNG

*Now oxygen generators, that clear sections of the station, require you to have a surplus of oxygen. Likewise, your own oxygen will only replenish if you're in a "livable" section and you have a surplus of oxygen. Fixed some discovered bugs as well.
*The Converter is now in place. You can take 20 of any element to the converter and, by sacrificing the 20 of element X you will receive 10 of either of the other two elements, chosen randomly. So there is a two penalty factor for this, you don't know which other element you're getting, and you only get it at a 50% rate. I wanted the players to be able to do something if the RNG was too brutal on the stars and they were desperate for a particular element.

The spaceport is now in the game. Build it and citizens will arrive at the cost of 50 hydrogen per arrival. Hey, intergalactic travel is expensive! Did some playtesting and balanced the costs of certain things. Worked on a start game menu, that you can now see in the video above. Improved star movement and tweaked the showing of stars. Now there are stars that don't generate resources, so sometimes you can have a lull in resource gathering.

Hoping to add lots of graphical improvements later this evening. Then save working on a tutorial and music for tomorrow. Giving me Monday to playtest and tweak things as needed.

Starting to feel the time pressure. I've spent most of today creating graphics, as most elements of the game have just had placeholders. Still need to make an enemy graphic, so I can get rid of the yellow rectangle. This is my weakest area. So hopefully I can make some passable stuff so I can work on gameplay/bugs/ and music tomorrow.
*Was able to add music, it's a ten second loop, but hoping it doesn't become too grating.
improved.PNG

FINISHED!

Lots of small gameplay tweaks and bug fixes. Some Quality of life changes as I've been playing it end-to-end. Today I added an actual end-game. Uploaded a short gameplay video and created an HTLM5 version as well as the Windows build. Also built out the tutorial.
 
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Josh Chen

Member
logo.png

The End

A cute little tower defense game by @bandman28 and @Josh Chen where an evil AI is trying to take over the world.
Oh yeah, and you are that particular AI.
Kill the humans.

DOWNLOAD LINK

- - -

BASICALLY
You must build robots to stop the pesky humans from destroying your master AI computer.

TO HELP WITH THIS
You can research formulas to make your robots more powerful. The formulas are made-up chemical compounds, and you'll need to combine elements with the right proportions to apply the upgrades to your bots.

HOWEVER
The creatures called humans will also get stronger and smarter, so your defenses will have to keep up!

AND ALSO
This is the end of the world. Maybe.​
 
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GameDevDan

Former Jam Host
Moderator
GMC Elder

Plunder Dungeons by GameDevDan

DOWNLOAD - https://gamedevdan.itch.io/plunder-dungeons


Latest Devlog Image
Devlog
Day 1 - Tuesday 30th November
  • Found leaked footage of @dadio 's entry to this jam.​
  • Came up with an idea for my game.​
  • Had a wedding to go to so did literally no more work.​
Day 2 - Wednesday 1st December
  • Had to travel back from the wedding (4 hours, 5 different buses, disco dancin' time).​
  • Had to tidy the house because I left it in a state before I left on Tuesday.​
  • Napped for a couple of hours to clear my hangover.​
  • Went out for a Green Party Christmas Meal. Had a Pizza.​
  • Arrived home too late to do anything, so did literally no work on my jam entry two days in a row.​
Day 3 - Thursday 2nd December
  • Wasted precious minutes of potential jam time typing out the nonsense above about my personal life
  • Came up with a name - Plunder Dungeons - which as far as I can tell has not been used in a game title before? How is that possible? (also please correct me if I am wrong).
  • Created a big spreadsheet of all the "elements" which are going to appear in my game as items that the player can use with different effects on their journey
Day 4 - Friday 3rd December
  • Spent all day putting up Christmas Decorations and putting together the flat-pack cabinet that goes with my new fish tank
  • Did literally no work on my GMC Jam game. Are you noticing a pattern here? Almost like the theme is PROCRASTINATION rather than ELEMENTS. Might have to do some weekend work on this bad boy.
Day 5 - Saturday 4th December
  • Started the graphics for my game. I am well behind and it's a long old slog, with even more real life things which are going to get in my way today, therefore you may notice that I am very closely using something as a direct reference (in some cases tracing directly over it!) for my elemental icons.
  • Went shopping, got back, filled up new fish tank and then spent ages tidying up packaging and so on and so forth. (not making my game for any of this time).
  • Finished creating the 50 elemental icons I need for the game and also the game's logo. A long way to go here ladies & gents and I haven't even made a dent. HOOOWEEEE.
Day 6 - Sunday 5th December
  • Made some background graphics for the "cards" used to represent the elements in the game. There are 50 (51?) unique elements, but for type matchups in battle they each count as belonging to a "group" of elements. E.g. things that seem "fiery" all belong to "fire" and are bad against "water". The card backgrounds will convey this and it's not as complicated as it sounds. Really your average new player should just pick this up intuitively if I implement it right!
  • Created a concept image for how the main gameplay screen will look... just need to actually make the proper graphics for it and program it into the game now (the GMS project for which still doesn't exist 6 days into the jam LOL)
  • Made graphics for the player for all 50 instances of elemental armor (phew!) now time to stop for lunch (Boiled potatoes, mixed vegetables & Quorn Sausage Patty if you must know).
  • Lunch was OK
  • Made graphics for all 25 enemies - still so much to go and all I actually have so far are 2 spreadsheets and a bunch of sprites. I still haven't even opened GM! Uh-oh. Here, have a look at some assorted graphics to distract you.
  • Graphics program ran out of memory trying to keep track of all my stuff. Good time to stop for dinner.
Day 7 - Monday 6th December
  • Finally finished all of the sprites for my game! time to get coding :)
  • Have finally created my GMS project and the first thing I did was create a functioning online highscore table?! Without any game to attach it to?! MADNESS!
  • Created a backend "database" in the game using the spreadsheets I created. Was really handy to get that written down at the start of the process as now I have all the data I want to handle on elements, attacks, armor and monsters for the whole game! Just got a whole lot of joining up to do to actually present you all with something you can play lol. Lunchtime!
  • Long old slog today. The world generation is in, the main character can walk around it, collect coins, and defeat enemies. But the actual "card collection" aspect, enemies fighting back, completing the run - that's all still to do. I'll upload whatever I have before the deadline tomorrow but I don't think it's going to be the finished article! Over and out (for now).
Day 8 - Tuesday 7th December
  • Did everything else that you see in the game in a mad bloody rush and didn't achieve quite the result I wanted, but I hope you enjoy it anyway.
 
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stenol

Member
Reserved for Stenol

Development Blog:
Day 1 : So, the theme is Elements. It's a very good theme. Now, I will think about a game idea Today. I have one or two ideas but I'm not sure.
 
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Pixel-Team

Master of Pixel-Fu

by @EvanSki @Pixel-Team @kburkhart84
DOWNLOAD LINK


Earth is being invaded by an alien swarm! Their is only one hope!
Launch the- Wait... is that a raccoon?!
Blast your way through waves of enemies!
Use the smart-bombs to ANNIHILATE your enemies!

Can you save the world?

Whatup its Evanski! hacking pat's post- not really just editing it for the team,
after the morning of everyone wondering if i was dead
turns out I lived

We decided on a space shooter game, Pat works the graphics, Ken works the music, and I am the lone coder
basic gameplay is done, we just need the fancy features, levels, gui and such
we are all pretty excited about the idea

Some more then others
ehhh.png

*EDIT* Pat Here. Day 1 is almost done and we got some good stuff happening, but @EvanSki is crushing it, and so is Ken. This game sounds and plays like a badass SNES game. We're going to try to get some gigantic boss fights, and maybe a cutscene or two, but I'm stoked at where we are presently. and P.S. It was a figure of speech when I said the game was giving me a boner. Kind of like how a good novel can leave you emotionally erect. Damn you, @EvanSki!!

Cant wait for this to finish

Heyo Evanski again, Staying up later then the bois to get extra work done
today, The ships damage is displayed with flames and smoke,
theirs an animation for when the player dies, the spaceship crashes and burns
lives are subtracted and if you have them you respawn
their is a placeholder continue screen until we get the game over sorted
Completely ripped out the old wave system for a nice and shiny new one that works amazingly well

Ken and pat have been saying im doing a remarkable job, but honestly most of the work has been pat making the game look amazing
Ken has been a great help too, their music and sfx make the snes fell autunitic and idk if i could pull off something of this quality without these guys

Im just the middle man making all this great work come together

Hey all, Pat here. So day three was a lot of pixelling for me. We did the stinger wasp that comes in and launches its tail at you, and his tails seek out the player. I also gave @EvanSki the meteors for the Earth Element Smartbomb. We also got some cool damage effects going where the ship catches on fire, and @EvanSki made the fire stay on the wing, even while the ship turns this way or that way. It was very cool, and all @EvanSki's idea, instead of having a shield meter.

Pat again. On day 4 we did the bomber and made him explode, and when he explodes a bunch of steel balls shoot out, and then those break open into two pieces, and then heat seeking stingers come out and come after you. We got some great music from @kburkhart84 up to this point, and I was working away on pixelling what will later become the Wasp boss...

Hey it's Pat. On day 5 we got all the Elemental Smart Bomb attacks working, and @EvanSki is hard at work on getting attack patterns happening. @kburkhart84 is busting out tracks. He's got a lot of great SFX for pickups, ship fire, etc. We did a countdown when you run out of lives, and I'm pixelling for my life, making cinematics for the intro and Victory sequences..

Hey it's Pat. Day 6 is put up or shut up day. This day we brought all the final pieces together @kburkhart84 music is all finished, @EvanSki has a complete game loop, and our Pixellated Hammered Raccoon splash screen is ready. I'm working in Spine, a first for me in Gamemaker and scripting out the Boss Fight. Working in Spine was essential to get such a large animated sprite with different moving parts, and I plan on using it again in the future. It's not till 6PM my time am I ready to turn it all over to @EvanSki who needs to make it work with the code.

Today is the last day, and the game is done. I made one last update to the Boss sprite, and @EvanSki made a pause feature, and a few other tweaks. @kburkhart84 was on audio, and our little baby is ready to go out into the world.

It was an absolute pleasure working with these guys on the game. They are both competent game programmers, and we all shared our unique perspectives on game development. I couldn't be happier with the final product, and no matter what happens, we gave this game everything we had. I hope you enjoy playing this game as much as we had making it! ENJOY!!

Hi evanski here, I basically fell like this gif

it was a blast to hang out with these guys, and I'd love to do another project with them
however this game really burned a hole in my brain heart fingers, i think my keyboard is on fire
anyways, Game is done and we put our heart blood sweat and tears into it, hope you guys like it
 
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Mightyjor

Member
1638842179446.png

***2 players only***
Download Link HERE

A Gwent style game where you have to merge cards in a limited space to try and have the most points by the end of 2 rounds. Totals reset at the end of each round, but your deck of cards doesn't!

ā€¢ Three different elements:
ā—‹ Fire
Ā§ Adds points to total attack. Win by having more than your opponent at the end of the round.
ā—‹ Grass
Ā§ Adds points towards merging/abilities/drawing cards
ā—‹ Ice
Ā§ Lowers enemy total attack points
Ā§ Lowers enemy total merge points

ā€¢ Special abilities
Merge: Each card has a merge cost equal to 1/2 the value of all its points totaled up (this is how a card value is determined)
Draw: Cost is equal to the total number of cards on the field plus one.

Basic Gameplay:
- Goal of the game is to win 2 out of 3 possible rounds.
- Win a round by having more FIRE than your opponent
- When a round ends, all cards are wiped from the board. You only get new cards in the EMPTY spaces of your hand, so use all you can! (There may be a way to throw away cards, haven't decided yet)
- Merging cards requires GRASS. Merging cards makes them take up less valuable space on the board and has a chance to increase their value!
3PM - Spent most of today finishing my project for the GXC monthly entry. Just did a little bit of work on my new project which I hope will turn out ok, though I'm entering in a lot of unfamiliar territory ground with a card game. I just set up a basic system that chooses a card element for today. Will probably not get to expand upon this more until tomorrow. Also found a pretty background on Craftpix.net.
1638314448661.png

7PM - Had a little time later to work on it and ran into my first big problem which is dragging the cards around and docking them on stations. It seems straightforward, but itā€™s going to get all my cards checking to make sure the mouse isnā€™t dragging a different card so they donā€™t all drag or dock at the same time. Oh well, Iā€™m sure Iā€™ll figure this out.

9:30PM - cards are merging pretty well and gameplay should be up and running pretty soon i hope.

5PM:
- Added values for the amount of fire, ice, and grass in each card. Cards of a certain type will automatically be higher in their own value
- Got the merging process working so that it adds the values of both cards together to ultimately make a better card. It also has a chance to provide a bonus point!
- Added a cost for merging. The cost is paid for in the amount of Grass that you have, which is why you want grass points.
- Merge cost is based on the total value of all points on the card divided in half and floored
- Gave the player a way to see everything going on, though its still pretty hard to make sense of everything on the field. Will certainly need to introduce things one piece at a time in the final game!


12am:
- drew a bunch of card bases for the different elements
- limited the card field from 6 spots to 5 so youā€™re more required to merge. Might even bring it down to 4, or I might make that one of the difficulty factors for different challengers.
- found a cool free art pack online of rpg battlers that adds a real PokƩmon vibe to the cards I think
- well what do you know, my second PokĆ©mon-like in a GMC jam! No sense reinventing the wheel, letā€™s make these some Awaremon too! Even though theyā€™re not really pathetic creatures here, itā€™s fun to think of this in some kind of mightyjor shared universe!
Wasnā€™t really able to get anything done today. Most thinking about how the game will work conceptually. Iā€™m at the stage now where I think Iā€™ll have to trim back a lot of stuff. May not get a chance to implement an AI, but I really hope I can. At the very least I should have a 2 player game set up.
1:30AM -
Today was my big day where I sat down for 4-5 hours and just hammered out the bugs and made the game work as intended. I don't think I'll have a lot of time this week to make all the changes I'd like, but the fact that its fully playable and hopefully mostly bug free means I did something I really didn't think I would be able to do.
Here's the breakdown of today's stuff:
- added more info for the player on the stats cards
- set up a turn system and a round system so that the game is winnable
- lowered total amount of cards on field to 4
- spent hours squashing pesky bugs
- recorded a "how to play" and posted it on here along with the itch.io page.
BG - https://craftpix.net/freebies/free-horizontal-2d-game-backgrounds/
Monster images - https://aekashics.itch.io/aekashics-librarium-librarium-static-batch-megapack
Music - Lyric Fantasy Background Music Pack - Andrew Sitkov (royalty free music)
SFX - Zapsplat.com (rf sfx)
Everything else by me
 

Attachments

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derboo

Member
goofyninja-right.gifNINJA MASSACRE 2: Master of the Elementsgoofyninja-left.gif
(artists who feel like arting please get in touch - as you can see, I'm especially bad with animations!)
OK I made a goofy ninja sprite and now I sleep!
- Starting the day with shopping free fonts for the title screen, implementing basic menus, etc.
- Then I implemented some basic collision behavior, going for bouncy fun whenever ninjas collide. Also reimported the pixel splatter effect from the first game and tweaked it for more effect.
nm2.png
nm2-03.png
Most of my dev time today was spent on making collisions work properly (more or less).

Oh and I also added multiple languages and configurable controls, cause that's time well spent for a quick jam game, right? Right??
controls.png
Mostly busy with day job stuff this day, but I think I'm finally happy with the feel of the basic physics so far.
 
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Bart

WiseBart

by Bart

Download Earlington Manor


Featuring the one and only



That ball just outside of town was nice. It's freezing cold outside now but there's no bus back home at this hour.
Well... Should've thought about that earlier, right...
You can't keep walking all night. You'll freeze to death!
In the distance is that mansion, the Earlington Manor. Belongs to that odd fellow that goes by the name of Theodore Ellington. Quite the odd figure, never see him in town.
Perhaps he can offer a place to stay the night...

Welcome to Earlington Manor. Enjoy your stay.
The end goal is to reach the top floor of the manor, where the guest rooms and Theodore Earlington are.
The three elements Wind, Water and Fire will help to reach that place in the following ways:
Wind: fans that blow you upward (think Zelda Wind Temples), blowing wind at rotating things that will move connected things (using a gear joint!)
Water: Mr. Earlington is quite the odd figure. When he ordered the construction of the Manor back in the day he required that the house could be filled with water from bottom to top. This will translate to a game mechanic in two ways: the first one is the ability to raise the water level in the entire game world which will give access to new locations (again think Zelda temples, Water temples to be more precise), the second one is the ability to extinguish fires that happen to be going on inside the manor. This should give some great puzzle gameplay if everything works out.
Fire: there are a couple of places inside the mansion where fire is burning (it just is). It can be extinguished by water. Aside from that, fire can be used to burn certain things in the manor which may allow access to new areas.
Earth: isn't clear yet... Sandbags could be an option but that would be fairly dull. Maybe plant a seed that immediately grows into a plant that you can climb (think Jack and the Beanstalk). Which is actually quite a nice idea that I might use.
Tuesday 30/11/2021 - Jam Day 1

18:45 UTC+1

I am completely caught by surprise that the Jam starts today, on a Tuesday... :eek:
The theme turns out to be ELEMENTS, which in my opinion couldn't be better after MYTHOLOGIES.

I don't have any ideas yet, though I've been vaguely thinking about these four elements: earth, wind, water and fire.
(apparently these are the classical elements which happens to be a seamless transition from last jam's theme)

Considering that we have about a week of time for this jam I'm going to prepare a bit, plan a bit in advance (usually it's a rush from start to end).
What are the technical achievements I want to focus on? What's the gameplay going to look like? What aesthetic should the game have? What about audio? 3D or not?

That's more than enough to think about! I'm going to see what I can come up with and hope to get some basics noted down by tonight.

21:15 UTC+1

I had something to eat and then spent some time on getting some basics working. I have more ideas in my head than I'm writing down at the moment.
The basic idea will be to let Box2D (once again) handle physics. Earth and water will be handled by LiquidFun and wind is simply applying forces.
Fire is a bit more complicated since it cannot easily be translated to the physics engine. Technically, it is a state where air is at a very high temperature.
Maybe the colormixing particles can work for this? (phy_particle_flag_colourmixing)
What I do know already is that it can be used as an attack and can be used to burn ropes.

The first quick test I did looks like this:


The first idea: a temple/dungeon with waterspouts, physics water, ropes that can be burnt and some other things that interact with wind

So far I haven't decided on making the game 3D or not.
It would be great but I don't think I'm at a level where I can use the physics engine to create an entire 3D world (currently thinking some Legend of Zelda temple and mechanics).
The one thing that seems impossible is the physics particles. I haven't found a solution for extending that to 3D up till today.

Time to think this out a bit more in detail now.

00:00 UTC+1

I tested a bit more and managed to add some ideas that could be interesting. And with that I'm done for today.
I'm pretty happy with this already!

A short video of the first quick 2D gameplay test with sand added. The lines represent a reflection along the mirror (to e.g. light a fire).

02:00 UTC+1


I wrote down the first ideas on paper. The game will be 3D and will continue to make use of Box2D to get most things done.
I also came up with a setting and a backstory: the mystical, somewhat ominous Earlington Manor.
The manor will be the game world. It will consist of several levels/floors, each one will have connections to different rooms, to hidden pathways, secrets, ...
And some floors will rotate, because we can :D
It will require quite a bit of planning and thinking ahead, though...

But that will be for tomorrow! I'm done for today!
01/12/2021 - Jam Day 2

16:00 - UTC+1

I've been thinking of some room names for the manor: patio, staircase room, foyer, study, bathroom, etc.
You will start in the foyer and then move to the staircase room (or "grand hall").
The grand hall will connect to all the other "rooms", a bit like a Zelda dungeon with several levels and doors to unlock.
That's the final goal I want to achieve for this jam.
Meanwhile I'm getting some ideas for 3D models to fit in there and also textures and patterns.
For gameplay, the main ideas will be verticality and free, smooth movement (seemingly flawless using a variety of 'tricks').
The test environment for that gameplay idea currently looks like this:


The player and a single side view instance. The other circles are fans that apply an upward thrust to the side instance (Wind)

It's time for a break now.
Next I want to expand on the above idea with a second side view (the yz plane) and then work this out in more detail.
If all goes well you'll be able to fly around the entire game world at the end of the game (unlock the jetpack).
It's looking incredibly boring right now. But it won't stay that way! šŸ˜€

20:30 UTC+1

The world now creates a vertex buffer out of the obj_wall instances that I place in the room.
My idea is to let part of the static scenery be generated by GM itself and then add a "layer" of details (i.e. an additional vertex buffer).
The projection is now also 3D and we can fly around! That is at least part of the Wind element.


I'm already incredibly happy with how this is working out!
Now I'm going to work a bit on the visuals.
02/12/2021 - Jam Day 3

12:15 UTC+1

A good afternoon! In the past hours I continued work on the collisions and also created a simple background theme in LMMS.
I used three what I would consider appropriate instruments for this manor atmosphere: a harpsichord, pizzicato strings and a cathedral organ.
This afternoon I'm going to create a couple of 3D models in Blender for those game objects that you interact with, since right now I have no clue when I'm colliding with something
(aside from the physics debug draw).

19:45 UTC+1

I just noted down a couple of gameplay ideas that came to mind. If this works out the gameplay will consist of an interplay between the four elements.
It also means that I need to think out the structure of the entire manor in advance so that it becomes clear which puzzles that you need to solve and how that interplay of the elements gets you further in the game.
This isn't simple at all, especially with my limited experience in gameplay, but I can say that I'm up to the challenge!

This afternoon I also created a couple of very basic models in Blender for the first game objects:


A screenshot of the first quick models in Blender. The device on the right will power connected physics instances through a gear joint (I guess it's an anemometer). The holes in the wall are where the water will pour out!

I'm not too happy about the color palette that I started using. Textures should be added, too.
Currently everything looks too flat.

I'm going for a nice evening walk to let everything process in my mind for a bit.
And let the fresh cold air and generated endorphins from the walk do the work!
03/12/2021 - Jam Day 4

7:45 UTC+1

A good morning! Early morning.
I'm all set for another jam dev day:


Part of the "dev" setting

I didn't do any work on the game anymore yesterday.
I did get some inspiration for the collisions during and after my walk.
I think I now have something that can work for this.
The idea will use a combination of phy_active and collision groups.
This really needs to be coded now so I don't have to worry about the collisions/physics anymore.
I'm going to start working on it right away, I need my full concentration for this.

9:00 UTC+1

I managed to write down the idea. Now it's time to code it...



13:15 UTC+1

Time for a tiny Midday update!
I managed to get quite a bit working already for the first side view for a single (manor) room.
That means that the second side view still needs to be done but I have to say that so far everything is coming along nicely.
Meanwhile I also learnt that there are a couple of US places that are named after Earlington. I had no idea šŸ˜
The game title is really meant to refer to a surname, though.

16:45 UTC+1

The second side view is working!
It took a while because I had to go look at the Fjootjah Skate code and see how I did it there.
From a technical perspective the physics trickery that's taking place here will be an improved version of that of Fjootjah Skate.
Meanwhile I also removed two unnecessary physics instances (the only thing they did was act as an origin point for the pulley joint).
One thing that is a bit odd now is that the player bounces back a bit when colliding.
From what I know that cannot be avoided, it's a result of the pulley joint attempting to keep the two side instances' y positions the same (i.e. the player "z"),
combined with the limitation that Box2D doesn't calculate joint connections precisely (points 2, 4, and 6 of the loose ends).
Maybe there is a way to fix or improve this but I haven't found it yet.

I feel like I'm biting through the sour apple this time with the foundation of the code.
All is going incredibly well up till now so I'm going to make the most of it!
This isn't entirely finished but I'm happy that most of the very difficult coding work is probably done.
What remains now is to get the collision group change along the x and y axes working as well and add multiple manor "rooms"
(i.e. the phy_active part of the collisions idea).


23:30 UTC+1

I added the collision group change and added and removed some walls in the side views.
It is working better than I had expected.
Tomorrow I'm going to do a couple of things:
Get the physics activate/deactivate of room instances working.
See if I can create directly in Blender and export from there using my existing exporters.
The current way in the Room Editor doesn't scale well to multiple "rooms".
Design the manor and the puzzles. Either in separate GM rooms or in a single room (depending on whether that phy_active thing can work).
Model and texture the environment.
That's for tomorrow! End of the jam day!
04/12/2021 - Jam Day 5

17:00 UTC+1

A good afternoon!

In the past hours I've been experimenting with adding physics instances to the side views.
So far it seems like the possibilities are nearly infinite! That's pretty great for '2D' GM!
Somehow the blue color of models seems to get lost, leading to all black models.
While that issue should get fixed I actually like the contrast that the black color gives.

I'm still undecided on the multiple "rooms" in a single GM room vs. multiple GM rooms thing.
I'll do a last try to see if the entire manor can easily be fitted into one giant room, otherwise I'll make each GM room a "level".

I have some other stuff to do now but I'm going to continue later tonight.

20:30 UTC+1

All side instances now add themselves to the instance of the obj_room object that they belong to.
This way a room instance ("room" as in "a room in the manor") knows which instances' physics to deactivate.
Currently they all need to be set manually in the Room Editor (by overriding object variables) but it gets the job done, so yeah...
Setting all those instances' phy_active to false gives a pretty neat result!
It's basically a pause/resume for those specific instances. Exactly what I need!

The reason that this is needed is because the side views (re)use the same collision groups because the number of groups that we can use is very limited.
So we can't just cut the room in as many pieces as we want along every axis and keep assigning new collision groups because we'll run out of group bits pretty quickly.
The number that Box2D supports is only 16.
So they need to be reused. The way I currently do this is by using groups 1-5 for z axis, 6-10 for x axis and 11-15 for y axis.
When two rooms' fixtures with the same group are active at the same time the player will also collide with the fixtures of the other room when inside the current room.
This is what disabling instances using phy_active solves so nicely.
When we deactivate the fixtures of a collision group in all other "manor room" instances, the player will only collide with those in the current room,
since they are the only ones active.
Problem solved!
05/12/2021 - Jam Day 6

11:00 UTC+1

A good morning! Here we are for day 6 (!) of the jam.
I got quite a bit done already in the past hours. I fixed the wind rotor not rotating correctly, added triangles for the floors
and connected the first wind rotor to a vertical mover using a gear joint.
It's working perfectly!

Theodore Earlington now also has a face:



It's now also as good as certain for me that the manor will be split up over multiple GM rooms.
So the game will consist of levels instead of one big room.
This will definitely make it easier to design the physics puzzles.
One big room gives the most possibilities and would allow for backtracking (i.e. water is high, is low later so you can enter, etc.)
but the complexity of all this goes above my head.
That's probably something for a later jam game šŸ˜›

11:00 UTC+1

The Grand Hall, the room from where you'll access the levels is done!
I also changed the colors a bit so the world fits the color palette better (AncientHeritage30).


22:30 UTC+1

I added the first new levels by duplicating the test room. These are mostly empty but they're ready for physics things to be added.
They're called "Water Hall" and "Wind Hall", since I'm lacking inspiration at the moment.
The mechanism to go from one room to another is also working properly.
The force from ventilators (updrafts) now goes down proportionally to the distance between the ventilator and the player.
That gives a nice visual effect and also limits the maximal height that you can reach.

For the water hall I started thinking how the LiquidFun particles could be put to use, but obviously they're only 2D...
That brings up one of those old tech questions that has intrigued me in the past: can the particle data be easily "dumped" into a buffer
using physics_particle_get_data, then converted to a vertex buffer and drawn in 3D in a way that visually makes sense and also
doesn't require too much additional processing on the buffer?

Code:
/// Buffer layout

// Possible format #1
// Dump the data to a buffer, use vx location to store z
// The advantage of this format is that there's room to store a third vertex that connects the other two, thereby forming a 3D triangle
// (this could work together with pr_trianglestrip...)
| u32| f32| f32| f32| f32| f32| f32| u32|    |   |    | ...|
|flgs|   x|   y|  vx|  vy| col| cat|flgs|   x|  y|  vx| ...|
     |  x1|  y1|   z|  ??|  ??|  ??|  ??|  x2| y2|  z2| ...|

// Possible format #2
// More concise format, use color to reserve space for a z value (also 4 bytes)
// Thing is... 3 consecutive vertices probably don't just make up a valid triangle...
| f32| f32| f32|    |   |    |    |
|   x|   y| col|   x|  y| col| ...|
|  x1|  y1|  z1|  x2| y2|  z2| ...|

While this intriguing thing will probably keep me busy thinking for a bit I'm going to end the work on the jam game for today.
Definitely made some good progress today!
06/12/2021 - Jam Day 7

13:30 UTC+1

A good afternoon! Phew, it's jam day 7...

This morning I started building levels in the Room Editor but that quickly turned out to be a tedious task.
From the start I had been defining the walls in the right and bottom side views using instances as well.
Updating an instance in one view meant updating its corresponding instance in the side view(s).
Combined with the need to continuously switch between room layers this didn't work out at all.
We're a few hours later now. Most of the code has been modified so everything is now derived from the topdown view, floors are still todo at this time.
The likely moral of the story: GM's Room Editor barely works for laying out 3D levels.
Hopefully in the future I'll be able to get such layouts exported from Blender so all of this can be automated.

15:00 UTC+1

The code is rewritten!
Now I only need to place instances in the topdown view: walls and floors.
It is the layer that determines the z "level" or "floor".
It took a lot of time but I can now finally create some levels! (with relative ease)
Here's how it looks in the Room Editor:


The view inside the Room Editor. Every "Floor_" layer corresponds to three collision groups: one for every axis (x, y, z) or, alternatively, plane (yz, xz, xy).
The gears, platforms and other moving things are defined in the side views (for now at least).


22:45 UTC+1

The first puzzle level is finished! It is called the "East Corridor".
I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. I'm not going to spoil anything here yet šŸ˜€
Also, this level editor is working pretty well! Meanwhile I'm also discovering a couple of interesting features of the Room Editor,
such as the rulers/guides and the ability to simultaneously select instance on multiple layers and copy them all at once.
All very convenient and an absolute necessity to allow for quick changes.

I'm finished for today. I couldn't be happier that I made it this far with this game already!
Tomorrow there's still a lot to do and I'll try to get in as much as I can.
To summarize:

- Improvements to working with context instances (currently only doors)
- Visual things: add standing chandeliers (?), fire particle effect for the torch, wind particle effect
- The treasure chest: put something in it and animate it
- Interact with Theodore Earlington. Add some dialogue when moving between rooms.
- Try adding one or two more puzzle levels and a quick ending.

That's still a lot to do but we'll see how far we get tomorrow!
07/12/2021 - Jam Day 8

12:45 UTC+1

A good afternoon! We once again reached the last hours of this jam.
This morning I spent some time on improving interaction with context instances and modified a couple of models.
I also added a couple of new rooms that I still need to fill with content.
Many other things on yesterday's "TODO" list won't make it in.
That's okay since I want to focus on adding more levels and gameplay.

Let's see what we can do in a bit less than four hours!

16:40 UTC+1

My entry is submitted! (a little bit late šŸ˜¬ )
I got quite a bit in there.
Unfortunately I discovered a breaking bug near the end when you enter the Flood Control room.
It may or may not occur. The game crashes for some reason.
I submitted the game as is though, since I want to stick to the deadline.

I need a break now šŸ˜. It was fun again!
 
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The M

Member
Stack
[DOWNLOAD]


Devlog:
Tuesdady

So, I think this is a pretty hard theme. I have an idea of a real-time construction game in the vain of Magnum Opus where you build space ships for an alien invasion by combining different ship parts, or elements if you will.

I've decided to try making this game in GMS2. It'll be the first time I use the engine and five minutes in I'm already lost! How do you add objects to rooms in this thing? It's going to be an interesting journey for sure! šŸ˜„

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Thursday

I've not had any time to work until Thursday night so the idea of using the extra time to learn the engine kind of didn't work. Instead I've about as much time as I normally do, except I can't even navigate this thing: I'm having big issues adapting, much more so than I'd anticipated. I won't go back, at least not for this jam, and I don't want to turn this log into one long rant so I won't go into details (tho things were better back in the days). I hope I'll get use to it in time, but for now it's clear to me that this is going to be rough, and it will likely show in the final product.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Saturday

Saturday evening and I still don't have much to show for my efforts. I'm considering starting over on something new and smaller in scope, because at this rate I don't feel like I will achieve what I set out to do and it's demoralizing. I'm slowly growing used to gms2 but that won't be enough to save this project. I'm going to go out on a walk and if I can come up with something interesting before I'm back I will try to do that instead.

Here's a gif of what I've got so far. Unfortunately the way I programmed objects to behave on conveyor belts don't scale well when you start welding them together so I would have to rewrite that code. I'm also missing cranes that can lift stuff off belts and rotators to spin stuff around. The game would require a lot of rules and handing of special cases, and I'm not sure what the best approach is yet. It's surprisingly tricky to make the conveyors behave.



---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Sunday

Yup, I'm doing it!
For the first time in jam history I'm scrapping my game and starting over half-way through. I've come to the conclusion that I can't create this game given the time frame so instead of making something that won't even be playable I'm doing something different entirely. New genre, new theme.

The new game will be a board/card game where your deck is themed around one of the four basic elements. Each element will have its own preferred play style (Wind moves a lot, Earth builds tall stacks, Water floods the battlefield and Fire just burns everything). At the end of the day the elements are mostly superficial, unfortunately, but I still think the game could be fun.

Your goal will be to control the board by placing and moving pieces. The trick is that you can stack pieces that then unstack as you move, allowing you to move further and if two pieces share a space the taller stack wins. You score points after each turn and there are four turns in total. Each turn you get six cards. You can either pay mana to play cards, or discard cards to gain mana. You start with 0 mana so you will have to burn some of your cards to play the rest.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I'm making good progress, but I'm (unsurprisingly) starving for time. At this point I've added most basic mechanics but only three different cards actually do something. I have ~24 more effects to code and then I need to create an AI for the opponent and add some UI elements (like picking your deck at the start of the game). I doubt I've got time to finish it all, but maybe if I can sacrifice some sleep šŸ˜–

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

It's late Sunday night and I've a playable game. There is only one deck that both you and the AI uses: the Fire deck, with explosions, wildfires and meteors. The AI is actually pretty decent, although I'd like to tweak it a little to reward moving off the map more (it scores you bonus points if you can achieve it). The AI works by ranking each card in its hand, given the current board state, and then tries to play its most valuable card. If it can't afford it, it will burn its least useful card until it can, or runs out of cards. It can create some pretty cool turns where it discards a ton of cards to play its aces! It's fun to watch :D

I'm going to go get some sleep, and hopefully I can implement one or two more decks tomorrow. Unfortunately, my schedule is really packed, but what can you do. At least I've got something working!

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Monday

I've managed to create a second deck of water cards. It is, in my opinion, not as exciting as the fire deck and I don't have time to buff it. I've won against the AI with it, so it's not complete garbage, but its power cards require a bit too much setup (or are too much setup) to be worth the payoff. I've standardized the card costs so I can't easily tweak that part. I've had GMS2 crash on me once now, just to make sure I don't get too fond of it. Luckily I'd already saved so joke's on it. I think I'll write up a short review of it here if I can squeeze in the time before the jam ends. It's not all bad :p

I'm afraid I'll have to cut it off at two decks, even though I've some code for the other two. I just don't see myself finishing them tonight. I will add a small deck selection screen before the game and show scoring a little clearer and maybe add some background music. It's past midnight (again) so I'll have to be quick about it.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

So, after having made a game and a half in GMS2, here are my thoughts.

The good: the new code editor is great and it's going to be hard to go back to the old one from GMS1. Being able to create multiple functions in a script is a huge boon, although it highlights the lack of overview features, and quick code navigation. Also, I'd have liked if the code-completion was a little smarter. It should be able to understand which variables are relevant in each context and not suggest (or push down) options that don't apply to the current object. It could also prioritize names I use a lot over less common words that just so happens to be alphanumerically ahead. For now, I need to come up with an alternative name for my controller object because here I have to write "contr" before I can quickly complete the word, and that's too much! :)

The bad: I don't know how best to put it, but I detest the new sprite editor. I think the new additions are awesome, but so many features removed or kneecapped it's hard for me to use it without getting frustrated and no amount of layers or animation tools can change that. The lack of basically any tools for adjusting the images (hue shifts, outlines, glow or gradients) make what used to be simple effects unreasonable. Worse is the lack of alpha support. Sure, you can set layers to have alpha, but whenever you want to draw something with transparency you need to perform so man steps each time you want to change color or alpha values. I didn't find a toggle for drawing with override so making corrections became near-impossible. Honestly, if I were to make the leap to 2 I might still use the old engine just for the sprite editor, and copy them over from there.

The slow: my final point of criticism concerns workspaces. Now, I realize that if you take the time to learn all keyboard shortcuts it can become a lot more usable, but for me it just seemed to add a lot more steps of mouse movement, clicking around and waiting for animations to end. I don't mind workspaces and I think they're a neat idea, but for GMS3 I think they need to be revised and heavily streamlined so that they feel snappy and to reduce the number of moves you have to make for each action. Your arms only last for so many mouse clicks and keybord strokes that you want to make sure not to waste them ;)

In the end I think I might go back to GMS1 for the next jam, but I do feel like I'm willing to give GMS2 another shot at some point. I'll also be using it to finish up the remaining decks in Stack, so it's not like I'm entirely deterred :D
 
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Mercerenies

Member
The Adventures of Squaredude and Circlegirl



Tag along with our two protagonists, Squaredude and Circlegirl, as they endeavor to defeat the evil Icosaking!

Download link: https://www.mediafire.com/file/27qo32fiy671kq4/SquaredudeAndCirclegirl.zip/file

Day 1
no devlog entries :'(

Day 2
Here are our two protagonists: Squaredude and Circlegirl. They walk around and can jump. That's about it right now.


Day 3
Pictured below are our two protagonists interacting with some stage elements. The panels on the left are elemental panels for Fire, Water, Air, Thunder, and "normal". Stepping on one transforms you into that state and allows you to channel that element. Squaredude is channeling Water and Circlegirl is channeling Air right now.

Fire will allow you to burn things passively and also to walk through active fires (fires will normally kill you). Water will allow you to put out fires and grow plants. Air will allow you to negate fall damage and launch objects. Thunder will allow you to power electronic devices. And, of course, "normal" is just... well, none of the above.


Day 4
Whew, all mechanics done and the level editor is finished. I'm about to fall over in my chair. Have a screenshot. In this picture, every puzzle mechanic is presented.

 
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Gizmo199

Member

some basics done for the "Elements"

Earth - Rock attack
Fire -fireball
Wind - deflect
Water - dash
Got the dynamic puddle reflections in for when you 'water-ski'

Added reflections to everything as well as enemy HP and 'vulnerability' state.

Wanted to add some gifs of the boss fight yesterday, but I was too tired to make some, so here is what I accomplished yesterday:

- I have decided to cut the 'wind' element and just stick with earth, fire, and water. Hopefully I will be able to get in 2 more boss fights! :D

- Okay, I got the boss finally done. Like done-done (for this jam period anyway).
- Added a sort of 'lobby' before you go into the boss fight.
- Added some explosions as well
- Added 'death' screen
- Added 'Win' sequence
- Added 'fog' background.
- Added Lighting
- Added Particles
- Added a LUT
GML:
Graphics programming = DONE;
result:
I really need to stop putting off this tutorial...ugh.
Jesus... 11 hours almost straight! That was a lot more work than I thought! lol. But I got ALL of the audio caught up (including for the boss fight) as well as a full tutorial!

- Added Tutorial
- Added Music
- Added Boss ending
- Added room transitions
- Added a ton of SFX
- Added 'fire pit' mechanic.
Woohoo! Got 2 bosses now! The second one involves a tornado but I don't wanna give too much away (don't wanna spoil anything! :p). Here is some of it from earlier!

Tornado Sprite Stack

- Added 2nd boss
- Boss has 2 type of attacks with 2 stages for each attack
- Added some other small effects here and there

not a ton to add since it was almost entirely just the 2nd boss. I will reveal it is the 'Water' boss.

The bosses are a bit hard but hopefully fair with the telegraphs. It's supposed to be difficult!!
OMG, I finally got the 3rd boss done!! That was a huge headache. I'm hoping it isn't too difficult. It seems I've made every boss consecutively harder! lol. They are more than beatable, and I think I've got it nailed to where if you DO lose to one, it feels more like a misstep on the players part and less that the game was unfair. By that I mean I think I've got everything telegraphed well with plenty of leeway.

- Added 3rd "FIRE" boss

And that's pretty much all I've spent the day doing! lol. Tomorrow I just need to add in:
- Main Menu
- Pausing
- Cutscene (?) <- We will see if I have time for this one...

- added main room (to get to bosses)
- added checking to see if bosses have been beaten to prevent re-spawning them.
I did it, guys! I've worked almost 24 hours straight on this thing today. Im beat, but I'm super happy with it!

Link


It includes:
  1. Progression saving (no deleting / starting new games though sorry. You'll have to go into app data and delete the .dat file if you want a new game. :p )
  2. Small intro cutscene + main menu
  3. 2 DIFFERENT endings (one is secret, can you find it!?)
  4. 3 bosses including a final boss battle
  5. Full interactive tutorial (not just text)
  6. Tons of sounds / graphics! lol
  7. Gamepad + keyboard mouse controls. Also supports left-handed keyboard mouse layouts
I am worn out! Everything was done within the jam time too! The only thing I didn't do is actually record any of the audio, but I did a lot of mixing, and also all the composition for the actual music (including the drums!). This has been my funniest / favorite jam yet! Can't wait to see what everyone thinks of it!!
 
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gametitle.png
Build atoms and molecules in this simple physics puzzler

One man team

Download Link

Main Menu:
screenshot_1.png
Making Single Atoms:
screenshot_2.png
Making Molecules:
screenshot_3.png

Dev Blog
I was on the old forums as UKDutyPaid and entered a couple of Jams back then (14 & 15... so long ago now!). I did pretty well in #14 with my game 'Remember Dummy', then less well with #15, and never finished my games for #16 and #17, then that was it for jams, but I always meant to come back! I haven't coded a game in ages and whenever I have randomly visited the forums it seems I have just missed a jam... but not this time! well, almost. I found out about this one on the Saturday and thought... let's do this!
Saturday Evening... Unfortunately I'm quite busy atm, and only found out about the Jam with one evening and half of one day available, but I thought, yeah I can knock out a game in a day! But what to do... Given that the theme is 'Elements', I immediately thought of my Jam #15 entry 'Atomise', which was about building atoms with electrons. There were quite a few bugs in that game and I thought I could do better, so decided to make a new version for this Jam... 'Atomic Jam' was born.

My previous version didn't use 'proper' physics, so I decided I'd use Box2D this time. There is something vaguely cool abut using physics in a game about physics... or is this about chemistry...? Anyway, Saturday evening was spent knocking out the fundamentals of the engine. The engine itself is pretty straightforward, so most of the time was spent fiddling with the numbers repeatedly until things felt about right! oh and of course ironing bugs... man how I have missed bug hunting and squashing...

I also gave some thought to the style of the game. I went with a square aspect ratio and a circular focus to the action, since it was about orbits and I wanted to maybe create the sense the player was zooming in to a microscope or something. I also wanted it to be minimal in design and relaxing rather than frustrating, with a chill music track and simple gameplay loop.

I finished the evening off by making some particle emitters, to make it look sexier (for little effort) whilst listening to some chill beats.
Sunday Afternoon. Chores done, adult life dealt with, now it's time to turn this little engine into a playable game with some kind of goal.

Obviously the game is about building atoms, which involves getting a certain number of electrons into orbit around a nucleus. In 'Atomise' you were required to get a different number of electrons into one of two orbits, low or high, so at first I repeated that again. But this time I knew I also wanted to be creating molecules from two or more atoms, and given the available screen space, and the fact I decided to have colliding electrons destroy each other*, it quickly became clear that orbit heights would be fiddly and make the game frustrating to both code and play. So instead I just went with a single orbital distance. ie as long as the electron is orbiting within the play area, then it counts.

*this choice actually turned out to have a fundamental impact on the gameplay, making it considerably more challenging, and I flip-flopped back and forth about whether to keep it in... for now it stays...

So, to make this an actual game with a goal, I set about building a sort of state machine/switch statement system for handling the levels. Originally I considered having a level for every element in the periodic table and just seeing how far people could go! But by the time I got to Argon, it was plainly hard enough! :D so there are 18 single atom levels, Hydrogen to Argon, which I split into 3 groups of 6 and decided that made for a pretty clean set of Easy/Medium/Hard levels.

All that took longer than I thought, so I only managed to then make another 6 levels for the molecules part of the game. The main challenge there was finding a range of real world molecules that could offer a scale of difficulty. I think I managed it just about, but if had more time, there would definitely be more levels. At one point I did have Magnesium Chloride as the final level, but with a requirement for 46 orbiting electrons, I decided to remove that impossible level in the hope someone might actually finish my game! :D

Finally, I spent some time in GIMP making button graphics and instructions and whatnot, trying to keep the graphics and colour pallet simple and consistent.
Sunday Evening. After dinner and time was basically up. So I prettied things up a bit, added some button feedback and sound effects, then spent an hour finding a chill tune (then coding in the ability to mute it lol).

And now here I am, writing a little dev blog before bed... let's hope someone reads it and finds it interesting! I'm scared to keep fiddling with the game now as I think I have found all the bugs (famous last words) and if I add anything now I'll probably just add bugs. I'm working all day until 9pm tomorrow, so doubt I will have any more time. So think this is it, although I might not upload the game until after work tomorrow, just so I can maybe have one last look at it before I commit.

As ever, I wish I had more time, but for what time I've had I'm happy I've actually managed to make a fairly rounded and complete package with some sort of achievable goal to it. I would have loved to add more levels and a high score/save system, tracking which levels you have completed and how many electrons you fired to complete each level, but alas no more time...
 
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Bearman_18

Fruit Stand Deadbeat
Featuring retro-style four-directional gameplay, a host of deadly enemies, and the least crappy soundtrack I've ever made, I introduce to you:

BREACHER BOB
BREAKS THE END USER LICENSE AGREEMENT

DOWNLOAD
^^^^^

20211207_044522_1_1.jpg

As a bonus, it loosely follows the theme this time around! MARVEL at such elements as: The element of wood, the element of electricity, the element of fire, and the element of cheap Chinese pot metal.​
 
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