“Finish Your Game” Jam Devlog Journal

“Finish Your Game” Jam Devlog: November 11, 11:27 AM

Today’s the third day? Idk, it’s Monday morning and the jam started at 8 PM on Friday. While things started off on a rocky foot Friday from being out in public, wonderful people in my life helped me feel better. I played a little Neltris just in case and went to bed.

Saturday though, I woke up, I thought about the theme for a bit, brainstormed with a dear friend, and came up with the idea for integrating the theme into my game. 

If you haven’t played it yet, please play it because there’s a twist and I’m pretty much going to spoil it now and then it will surely naturally come up more in the journal because it’s the thing I’m mostly going to be working on this jam.

So, I was debating between mechanics or level design for the theme “Oh, and one more thing” and ultimately, level design won out. The original idea was a horizontal level, with pits and enemies and an on/off at the start that you can flip on or off and that would determine your path. Then, you get to the end, realize you need the other one switched (this troll was there from the start), backtrack, and then take the other path.

But there was a problem. What if you died on the way back? Or on the other path? How could I use the troll efficiently without making the player too confused? And then it struck me, vertical Getting Over It level. When I started thinking about abilities to make available, I figured wall jump and rope climb (perfect for mountain climbing).

So, I had to add on/off blocks and a system to have it create the blocks opposite your switch when you get to a certain point. Just one problem. I’m using bespoke block code for all my blocks and I want a structure in place to add these new blocks (and future blocks) efficiently. So, I started work on that. And it went bad for a while. Everything was broken. But then, I figured it out and got it so it was reading the txt document with information about custom blocks.

Then I came up with the flourish of the twist, Columbo doing his famous “Oh, and one more thing” bit about the block at the bottom. So, I reached out to my ex about some Columbo fan art and made some of my own as well. And with that, Saturday rolled to a close.

Sunday, I figured I needed to work on the block data structure more, but I really wanted to make it easier to add default blocks (ideally, taking a 256x256 single image and having it break into a Picotron gfx file of 256 16x16 tiles, moving that to my cart, and doing nothing else).

So, I made a tool that splits up files that way lol. It took most of the day and I posted it on lexaloffle: https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=145269

The implementation of the second part, making it so you didn’t have to do anything else, was the difficult part. Thanks to help from one of my partners (me getting help from people is a running theme here; no dev work is truly solo), I figured out how to implement it and added a new tileset. And then promptly crashed out.

This morning, I worked on the background of the new tileset more and made two splash screens for startup. It seems like I kind of have to wrap up the structural stuff and then hopefully finally add on/off switches today. Then, level design, then the Columbo cutscene. So, it seems like I should wrap this up on time pretty easily.

Signing out for now,

Maya

“Finish Your Game” Jam Devlog: November 12, 10:11 PM

I’ve had nothing to really show for my work over the past two days. The rest of Monday was spent entirely on bugfixes of existent work. I worked like wild just finetuning all these things I had finetuned already. Player issues. Melon issues. All resolved, painstakingly. I think I wrapped up at 1:00 AM and went to bed.

I woke up promptly at 7:00 AM and got to work today on wrapping up structural stuff and hopefully adding on/off blocks. Nothing could prepare me.  At 2:00, the structural stuff was testable. It was done shortly before I started this journal entry.

This tells you two important things about my day. One, I woke up and wrote code for 7 hours without testing it. Two, it took me 8 hours to get that code to work. And uh yeah, that’s 15 hours. I did take a couple of breaks to make lunch and watch Barry and make dinner and watch a dear friend stream. Probably 3 hours total.

And those 12 hours were so dang frustrating, at least the back half where I was purely debugging. A million little things were wrong with the code, but there was one huge glaring issue in a chunk that I didn’t have eyes on.

One of my partners told me listening to Brat seemed to help me with coding and my favorite track was ending right as I hit ctrl+s when everything worked and a wave of relief washed over me, so that definitely got reinforced today.

Alright, maybe I should go to bed since I’ll probably wake up by 7. Tomorrow, there are going to be working on/off blocks, dang it.

Exhausted,

Maya

“Finish Your Game” Jam Devlog: November 14, 12:36 PM

Today went so well… up to a point. Things went fast and easy all morning. I got all the blocks added, almost all the interactions in place, drew a little Columbo sprite (I made him short since Peter Falk was much shorter than me). 

I said I was going to be done. I tried to be done. I promised myself I’d take a two day break. I promised someone else I’d take a two day break. But I wanted to do level design and doing level design, I found stuff that was broken. Like, lots of stuff. And I tried to fix it until about 9 and took a break to watch a movie with a friend (Omg, it was so good, y’all. 綿の国星) and then went until 12.

I’m so tired and I made a status on Discord to yell at me if I have Picotron open. So, I have to sit on a broken game for two days.

I’m going to bed now.

More Exhausted,

Maya

Cat Music Experiment: Day 1

This experiment is to determine the effect cat sounds have when paired with human music for the mood of nearby cats.

Around dinner time, researcher Maya Zimmerman’s cats came to request dinner, but on hearing Jazz playing from her speakers, pinned their ears back and trotted angrily away.

Preliminary research indicated that cats do not enjoy human music, but rather cat sounds.

Delighted by the prospect of listening to cat purring, Maya put on a 10 hour video of such and mixed it to an audible but not overwhelming level compared with the music playing.

The cats were immediately interested and came back to the room to “hang out” much more frequently through the day than usual, despite music otherwise driving them away. 

Additionally, they seemed to react to the emotional nuance of the human music rather than simply being soothed by purring. Energetic music with purring led to climbing, fighting, exploring, hiding, fun stuff, while calm music with purring led to laying about (even researcher Maya laid down for a bit).

These are just the results of the first day of testing. Further testing is clearly required.

…

What?

A game?

A game jam?

Happening now?

Ohhhh right that thing.

I took the last three days off mostly, except to spaghettify my code to get the physics more just right (I think? Maybe?). I’ve probably spent about 2 or 3 hours of the last 70 working on my game. At first, it was strictly enforced, but then I got comfortable. I’ll work on it again tomorrow.

Maybe. (November 16, 9:55 PM)

Yawn and a Big Stretch,

Maya

[Mini-update: The cat fell asleep on me listening to Nubya Garcia’s Source]

“Finish Your Game” Jam Devlog: November 21, 4:28 PM

The jam content is done. I took pretty much the entirety of the time between the last post until yesterday off. I needed it badly.

Yesterday was the start of getting the dialogue framework in place. And it went pretty miserably. The game crashed every time I ran it yesterday, at launch, at level load, or at dialogue initiation. When I went to sleep around 4:00 AM, it was still broken.

This morning, I fixed the issue almost immediately, and got to implement the actual mechanic of adding blocks. Everything went relatively smoothly and now it’s ready to post.

Looking back on the jam, it was a great time overall despite a severe crash occurring in it and it’s been great seeing other people working on things throughout the whole thing. I can’t wait to see what people post at the end. 😀

Thank You for Joining Me,

Maya