Hello Internet!

I decided to join A Game By Its Cover this year. If I can finish a game, it will be my first!

After a couple of years learning the basics of game development, I feel ready to make a simple game in 2 weeks.

I chose Shark Blaster, which will be a very simple underwater cute'em up.

I'll go for a 8-bit aesthetic, mainly because it'll allow my bad pixel art to be done faster.

Tools

For coding, I'll be using HaxeFlixel because I'm rather familiar with it and it comes with a lot of solutions out of the box. Also, it'll let me get the game playable on the web easily.

I'll also use Tiled for editing levels. I never used it seriously before, and I'm not sure how well it supports scrolling levels, but I guess I'll find out!

For pixel art I'll be using Piskel, and probably GIMP. I prefer GIMP, but Piskel is good for animation and probably a better fit for the simplistic look I'm after. I'll probably use GIMP for backgrounds, although I don't really have any experience doing backgrounds!!

Day 1

OK, so this is the first day and I think I've already made good progress:

• Wrote the basic player movement and shooting code
• Drew a basic "sea" backdrop, much like Super Mario Bros. underwater level
• Made a basic level using the sea and sky tileset with Tiled
• Wrote code to make the Tiled level work in the game

Here's the current result!

I'll probably also be uploading the source code somewhere.

Keep you posted!

Day 2

OK, not much time to work on this today, but managed to get a first pass at the player sprite:

I don't like it at all, except for the shark-sub a little, and it doesn't look right "under the sea".
I'll try a couple more passes, probably make it bigger and use outlines.
Anyway, I think it's a good starting point, and I hope to do a bit more today.

Something I forgot to mention yesterday is I'm also using Wekan to track todos and ideas, you can follow progress here if you like:
https://gekan.herokuapp.com/b/bWFZ4C3gWkj5MkEY7/shark-blaster

See you tomorrow!

Day 2

No time today either! I managed to do a better player sprite:

It still isn't the final version (I want to at least have a silhouette of Miu in there).

Anyway, as I said, no time today! Be seeing you.

Day 3

Whoa, didn't have time to work on this until today (you know, life gets in the way).

Not much done today either:

• updated the code with the new sprite
• made the player shoot in the facing direction
• uploaded the code to GitLab (GPLv3 baby!): https://gitlab.com/gonzalodelgado/sharkblaster
• setup pipelines to automate builds, and upload "playable" versions here: http://gonzalodelgado.com/SharkBlaster

Anyway, there's a lot more to do, not sure if I'll finish before the deadline, but I'll keep on pushing forward!

Day 4

Hello again Internet!

Made good progress today:

• Listed potential enemies
• Enemies can now be placed using Tiled and even get damage and health values from the editor
• Implemented basic enemy placement and movement code
• Implemented initial hurt and damage logic (you can kill enemies and even die now!)

You can try it yourselves here: http://gonzalodelgado.com/SharkBlaster :-)

Be seeing you!

Day 5

Hi there!

Accomplished a few things today :D

• Sidescrolling!
• Added gamepad support
• Added README file
• Hid mouse pointer

Obligatory in-progress GIF:

See you tomorrow!

Day 6

Hello again!

Only a couple of things done today:

• Level progression code (next level file is loaded and playstate is reset when the current level is finished)
• Better movement code

With a few days left, I'm trying to think what the are the most important things I need to focus on in order to have a playable game in time.

Anyway, I hope to be back tomorrow with another update, but weekends are a bit crazy!

Day 7

This is what I did yesterday, hopefully I'll have another update today.

Yesterday did only a couple of small things:

• Title screen
• Level greeting

Not much really, hoping the deadline is extended. Otherwise I'll send a late submission.

Anyway, here's a GIF with the game so far:

See ya'!

Day 8

So glad the deadline was extended! Although I'm starting to feel I won't make it!

Anyways, didn't get to do much work until today and I spent a ton of time trying to load enemy sprites from the tiled map data.

I finally did it, and improved my understanding on how to work with Tiled, but I think I took longer than I needed.

Here's what that looks like:

I hope to make more progress in the time left!

See you!

Day 9

No time today. Only managed to do a small code cleanup update: use a Map to associate enemy type strings (defined in Tiled) with classes. This way, now I have a base Enemy class, and can have a subclass for each type of enemy.

This is possible thanks to Haxe's reflection API, which I learned about today :-)

OK, too much coding for today, I have to turn to graphics and level design.

Bye!

Post mortem

OK, game is far from finished, but I submitted what I have as a "playable demo", and will continue working on it for #1GAM (I'm giving myself a 33 days deadline).

I really liked the experience, and learned a lot in very little time, so I wanted to share what I learned here.

Just do it!

It's obvious, but the days I started to work on the game right after (and sometimes during) breakfast proved to be the most productive. I have been learning how to focus for a while now, but participating in this jam helped put a lot of what I learned in practice.

Pixel art takes time!

I'm very new to pixel art, I took an Udemy course earlier this year and had been practicing a bit, but this jam really put my small knowledge to the test, and I have to say that's where I failed the most. I found myself trying to rush it, and getting frustrated because I was never able to make the assets look the way I wanted them to look. So I learned I'll have to take my time with it, and practice a lot more. This is something I want to learn and become good or at least decent at.

Game programming isn't too hard!

Don't know if I mentioned this, but my day job is web development, so I'm coding most of the day. I have been trying to learn how to make games for a couple of years now, and at first the programming part felt quite intimidating because there seemed to be a lot of math and advanced algorithms involved, and a lot of coding seemed to be required for the most basic stuff. But this turned out to be the easy part!

I love gamedev!

I sometimes thought learning how games are made would take the "magic" out of videogames, and I wouldn't enjoy playing them as much. I was so wrong! This makes the experience so much more enjoyable, as now I can look at games with a different, but positive, perspective, and thoughts about how a pattern or movement is coded, or how a sprite or background are put together start popping into my head. This is especially true when playing entries for this jam. I love it!

Anyway, I'll continue working on SharkBlaster. I'll try to keep posting devlop entries, but to it's official devlog now :-)

Thanks a lot for reading!