Monday, December 21

After successful brainstorming while working on my actual job, I decided on the concept of the game. A 2D platformer set in a large stranded spaceship. The gravity system is all messed up so the player has to adapt to gravity of varying direction, intensity, or lack therof. I am starting the actual game setup now!

Monday, December 22 (1 AM)

Real world work got in the way of making too much real progress. I learned how to use Box2D (I have always made my engine from the ground up in the past) and set up the basic animation and plat former engine. Looks good so far, plan to have a full prototype tomorrow.

Okay so I have now put a total of 60 minutes into coding this game, and about a half hour looking for some art. I have a working prototype of the platformer engine. I am using a object layer in tiled to create the collision map, and tile layers to create the displayed map. Looks pretty so far. Just put it on github http://github.com/sugarware/gravity. Rethinking using 6.67408 as the name. Hopefully I will find time to actually make this game.

Spent 10 minutes writing a snippet to record gameplay to a gif. It works but it is slow and the GIF speed is far too slow. Ended up using fraps and giphy:

To those looking at my git, yes I know the current ResourceManager is awful and hogs memory, just put it in there as a placeholder for later implementation.

Been working on it a few minutes here and there. I added some stuff so I can make a few test levels using Tiled. Starting to come together.

View post on imgur.com

Starting to make a bit of progress. Added some UI and other entities. Need to get the rest of my tileset sorted out and I can really start making some pretty levels.

Just got acclimated to Box2D lights. What a cool library. Also text hints and doors.

View post on imgur.com

Okay so I've only been able to work a few minutes here and there but I added:

Doors that tell the GameStateManager to switch states

Smooth transitions between states

Dynamic boxes

Tuned the Lighting

More Tiled integration

School starts this week so I will ask classmates if they want to be level designers but I simply have no time.

Got a classmate who I'm helping learn Java (and libGDX) to help me draw levels on paper. Gonna build them with tiles and I'll hopefully have enough substance to submit.

So I REALLY hope the next game jam isn't during a busy period for me. Stayed up late for a few hours tonight making some levels. There are only 6 to play. Tomorrow I will clean up the menu, add a "Controls" screen, make sure credits for all assets used are in order, find a few sounds/songs, beautify the levels then put everything into binaries and upload. It is a fun game and the engine works, it isn't optimized by any means but the game runs. If I have time I will make the on screen controls for android/iOS. Maybe I will continue to build on this game in the future. See you tomorrow, hope it ends up well.

Goals I completed with this game:

-Platformer with a twist

-Completed with <24 hours of actual work put into it

-Made without googling for anything but javadocs and assets

-First time using Box2D and Box2D lights

-Mario Zechner (Author of the first coding book I've read, before I even heard of libGDX) will play MY GAME!

Final Devlog

I got the game done... sort of. Six levels with an intro. I messed with the GWT but couldn't get it right so I am just going to upload a jar. You'll be able to see if I got a chance to make the Android version when you visit the submission page. It is a short game but I hope you all like it!

Submitted!

Play it here: http://sugarware.itch.io/gravity

Fork it here: https://github.com/sugarware/gravity