My game is going to be a virtual board game where a team of four pets try to find their way home after being separated from their owner.

I had been thinking of board game ideas involving pets for a while, so when I found out the optional theme I knew exactly what to do. My "spin on a popular story" is a version of Homeward Bound: The Incredible Journey! The spin I guess is that its not just 2 dogs and a cat. Since I'm also doing all of the pixelart for another game this is starting pretty slow. Nevertheless, I wanted to make a thread and post my concepts and what little work I've done!

First off I have written a lot of notes and concepts for how I think the game should work. At this stage, I'm not completely settled on the exact way things work, but I have ideas that feel very board-game-y. Also please ignore my 2nd grade level handwriting.

The game is played by moving around the board, which is comprised of hexagonal panels. As you move toward the edge of the board more panels are revealed. When you land on a space an event will happen that can either harm you or help you find your way home. I'm planning on making some terrains safer than others, but maybe making dangerous ones also offer larger rewards. There will also be special terrains that rarely appear but give you a good event guaranteed. Right now I'm thinking you collect "Clues" and once you have 10 your home is revealed and you only have to make it there to win.

Each animal will have different stats and perks, which can help avoid some events or make it easier to find clues to get home. I'm hoping to get 5 pets into the game during the jam. You'll be able to play as a Rabbit, Cat, Dog, Bird, or Turtle. Here is the character portrait for our first pet.

This is Baozi. She is my now deceased pet rabbit who shall live on through my art. I'm planning on rabbits being able to move further because they're fast and be able to avoid bad events sometimes because they are very alert. They will also have less health than some of the other animals, so be careful.

I'm hoping to have a small card with relevant information about your pet, each of which will have a lovely portrait like this one. the art for the gameboard will not be quite this high-res, so don't worry, I should survive making this.

your pixels are super charming--i'm excited to see them now in a game! i can't wait to see the rest of them *__* !!

This sounds totally adorable, plus you're including a turtle. I look forward to hearing / seeing more.

I'm glad you like my pixels because that is still all the progress I've made! I should be able to kick off actual development soon, but until then I'm making small assets in my spare time. Such as...

This mockup of the game board. Only two terrains pixelled so far, but this is the basic idea. You will move around the board and more of these little tiles will get placed around the edges.

i like the colors you've settled with! they're very cool and the borders are very quiet.

Hello I finally made some progress on this. It took a while to figure out how to make stuff random, and I'm sure I'll still run into issues in the future but...

The game now randomizes the tiles. Right now they have an equal chance of being placed, but once I have a few more tiles in the game they will have different probabilities. I also want to try to attach some rules to them so you don't get like 12 forest tiles in a clump. Also you might have noticed a couple new tiles in here.

I added lakes and mountains. I'm probably going to redo the lake, but the mountain looks pretty nice I think. I also did slight anti-aliasing so they look nice when they're together on the board. Tell me your opinions on them.

Next on the list:

• Give you a movement limit/turns so it feels like a board game
• Make it so when you land on a space an event happens
• Add a couple more tiles and give them probabilities of appearing
• Simple animation for movement so it isn't boring
• Block some tiles from view so you have to move closer to uncover them

I'm not sure how long all of that will take, but those are my goals for the foreseeable future. You can already move the piece around the board, but it doesn't look pretty so I didn't make a gif.

That's all for now! Thanks for reading!

whoa great work on the randomizing! i've read a couple articles on procedural generation but it tends to go over my head. maybe finding some algorithms like that might be cool to look into? (tho possibly beyond the scope of the jam, depending) this is looking awesome!

Hi, I did not completely disappear yet. Obviously I didn't finish this in time for it to be part of the jam, but I would like to make a post about what I've learned and how I felt during this jam.

First off, I went into this jam feeling confident and with high hopes. I felt very good about how the jam went last time and because of that and other practice I had done I thought I would do very well. I aimed higher than last time and decided I would use more colors and try to make something unique instead of just another easy platformer. I also thought it would be nice to help someone else out, because I want everyone to be able to make games.

The problem is I didn't find out how much work the person I was helping wanted me to do, and that's on me. I should have figured out exactly how much work they needed before I agreed. This is thing #1 in my list of things I learned this time. I still felt confident, but doing that much pixelart at once was way more than I was used to. I got super stressed and tired which made working on my own game very difficult.

Another problem is that I was so confident that I waited until a day or so before the jam to decide what I was going to do. All of my ideas were for games I had no clue how to make, because I wanted to learn a lot this time. I should have decided on one weeks before the jam and looked into some tutorials to help me. If I had, I might have been able to finish this instead of messing around after I finished some tiles for the other game.

END OF WEIRD RANT THING

So, what is the fate of this game? Well it was part of a larger idea I wanted to do of a few different board games you could play. I still very much want to make that so I'll keep working on it. Despite making barely any progress on my personal project, I feel good that I helped someone else with their game and I learned a lot about stuff I should do in the future. Thanks again for the jam and the community, sorry I messed up lol.