The game is live!

https://itch.io/jam/my-first-game-jam-summer-2018/rate/284674


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Hi all! We're Dino House, and we're super excited to participate in this season's jam! You might remember me from the January My First Game Jam, where I made Confection Connection with 4 other people! This season, I'm part of a whole new team of jokers great people :)

And so, our game!

Salvage is a casual role playing game about sea exploration and hedging your bets on sunken scraps. Erm .... that sounds a lot darker than it actually is, it's lighthearted and fun at it's core! The core game loop is as follows:

1. Set sail

2. Find scraps and materials

3. Bring those scraps back to the dock

4. Sell those scraps at face value or salvage the scraps yourself for materials

5. Use those materials to upgrade your boat

Stylistically, the game is still under discussion, so as it develops you might see combat mechanics, story or rogue-like elements. We want to deliver on the core game loop first, but hopefully we'll also deliver some fun flavortext along the way, too.

I'm writing this on day one, so tomorrow I'll update you on everything we've worked through so far!

okay, it's a lot harder to write about victimless (and sorta legal) piracy than it is to write about a space cafe visual novel.
Hopefully you all enjoy the ride regardless!

And, before I go:

DAY 2: https://itch.io/jam/my-first-game-jam-summer-2018/topic/257722/devlog-salvage?be...
DAY 3: https://itch.io/jam/my-first-game-jam-summer-2018/topic/257722/devlog-salvage?be...
DAY 4: https://itch.io/jam/my-first-game-jam-summer-2018/topic/257722/devlog-salvage?be...
DAY 5: https://itch.io/jam/my-first-game-jam-summer-2018/topic/257722/devlog-salvage?be...
DAY 6: https://itch.io/jam/my-first-game-jam-summer-2018/topic/257722/devlog-salvage?be...
DAY 9: https://itch.io/jam/my-first-game-jam-summer-2018/topic/257722/devlog-salvage?be...
DAY 10: https://itch.io/jam/my-first-game-jam-summer-2018/topic/257722/devlog-salvage?be...
DAY 11: https://itch.io/jam/my-first-game-jam-summer-2018/topic/257722/devlog-salvage?be...
DAY 12: https://itch.io/jam/my-first-game-jam-summer-2018/topic/257722/devlog-salvage?be...
DAY 13: https://itch.io/jam/my-first-game-jam-summer-2018/topic/257722/devlog-salvage?be...
DAY 14: https://itch.io/jam/my-first-game-jam-summer-2018/topic/257722/devlog-salvage?before=17#post-487751

This is a cool idea! I'll definitely keep my eye on this project (O.o) Can't wait to see how this turns out! 

Alrighty! If I included everything we've worked on in the last two days, it'd be a total mess. So instead, I'm gonna drip feed mechanics as we go along. Starting off, the overworld mechanic! As you saw momentarily yesterday, the overworld mechanic serves as the connection between the dock and any dives. Pressing forward moves the boat in the direction it's facing, and left and right turn the boat. The boat's turning speed is related to how fast it's going, so you can't turn very fast in place.  I'd show you this, but that requires making a gif and yesterday's gif literally took me 30 minutes to figure out hhaaaA

On spots where you can dive, a button prompt pops up, at which point you'll be taken to a separate, side scrolling level. Jimpy - erm wait, I haven't introduced the team yet, have I.

OK uh

That'll do.

Anywho, Yesterday, Jimpy made the boat movement system, and today started working on the diving mechanic and drew some concepts for the screen:

Essentially, your boat appears on the top of the screen, and you can see deep under the water. This screen is randomly generated. Or in theory it will be. You'll be able to pick up materials and hopefully, the boats and caves will contain dungeons of sorts. 

Barkley coded the UI, and put together an inventory system, including but not limited to:

And lastly, Myserval worked on drawing and implementing the tile map for the game.

After, of course, watching way too many aesprite tutorials. These tiles will most definitely change. I'm indecisive.

Oh boy I keep leaving this for last, and I'm starting to think that's a bad idea.

This one's gonna be quick, cuz I gotta keep working on this stuff- I'm leaving for a weekend, so I've gotta work double time. Of course, as well, I'm finally starting to get scheduled again at work so I'm working 6 hours a day too. Oh joy. 

That's important gamedev stuff, i swear. 

Okay! We'll start off with some conceptual stuff:
Jimpy connected the overworld to the diving layout, at long last watching enough godot tutorials to figure out how to switch to a new scene.
Myserval adjusted and tried to change the boat movement mechanics, and partially succeeded
Barkley finished the inventory system, but not after a solid "inventory broke" commit to the github page and over 5 hours of going nowhere. But it works now! 

Art!

Myserval fully added the tileset for the most basic shapes: Island edges and corners. No concave pieces yet, but now the boat collides correctly with the islands. 

He also finished the main character sprite. It's not the one in the picture above, that was an early concept that I decided to put in for some reason. Also I just referenced myself in the third person and the first person in the same paragraph. jsesus

Here's the main character!

Here's swimming animations too!

To be used in conjunction, of course hahahahahhahahaahh oh god its late I can't fix that second one just for the devlog

In other news, Barkley set up the level music system. He also downloaded a pirates of the caribbean midi.

It's practically midnight again, so you know what that means!
Devlog time!

Jimpy made a super simple enemy AI, and Myserval made some sprites to go with it:

So far, super simple. Myserval continued work on underwater tilesets.

Sorta a rest kind of day for sure. 

That's also mainly because we talked a lot about how best to continue developing the game out- what to focus on and the like. We're still discussing that - we're indecisive, I think.

anywho- Jimpy thought of a great idea:

and Myserval had some trouble with the enemies:

Seee ya tomorrow!

Items! Yes, items. let's take a look, yeah?

okay that's too small, hold on. Computer, zoom! enhance!

Yes, that's right: we've got basic materials. Myserval went through and made three basic materials for now: wood, metal and money. That might change by the time the game's in your hands, but the idea is there. Myserval also made some chest sprites. Three, to be exact.

Jimpy made it so that chests could be openable, and myserval made some new tiles for boats underwater. The water shader got adjusted, and myserval spend way too long trying to figure out how to get the character to move up slopes. That's still unsolved.

Here's a lot more items Myserval sprited today:

There's one artifact, 4 upgrades, 3 materials and 4 weapons, just to give Jimpy and Barkley some content to chew on while he's out for the weekend. Those are tiny but it's currently 1:20 am the day before I leave for the weekend. there i go with that inconsistent pov again oops

Artifacts will be a lot like upgrades, but with the idea being that they're rarer and add a lot more interesting effects. The skull necklace, for example, will deal a small amount of damage to enemies per second.

And two decorations, too: one of wood and one of metal:

And lastly, for figuring out how to make the big stuff show up on the character, the old man without his diving gear

Thats all I've got time for! See you all tomorrow! well, hopefully: I don't know what all I'll have to show but we'll definitely see!

Myserval posting a devlog before midnight? It's more likely than you might think.

That's right! It's the vacation episode of .... the salvage devlog .... Cuz I'm in a ski town! In the summer. It's a lot more effective, I think. 

Well, it's sorta not a vacation- it's a half vacation, cuz I'm here for my younger brother's soccer tournament. Which means I have a lot of downtime to work on music :)))) It also means that I'm gonna be releasing these devlogs with a lot less pretty stuff, cuz image uploading on mobile is hard hahaha

Going on vacation in the middle of a game jam? Folks,

Anywho: Barkley implemented the coins I showcased yesterday and the mechanic of picking them up - right now it increments a variable, but at this point it's easy to add an entry into the inventory system, so you should see item pickup happen soon too.

Barkley and Jimpy made a sort of soft laundry list of items we'd like to add to the diving scene to finish it off. Realistically, the diving portion of the game is really gonna become the core of the game here, with all of the game's progression happening in the diving rather than in the boating -especially for the jam. 

And, well, I guess that's it! I'll be back in two days (vacation, y'all) to show you more new stuff! And maybe some music. We'll see :P 

Here's some of those boat tiles I made, I don't think I've shown them directly:

I'm starting to feel pretty confident in my ability to choose colors and keep to a style and things like that, especially having never worked in pixel art before.

This particular post might feel a bit pointless, but I really just wanted to let you know that there's not gonna be a devlog tomorrow :)

and yes, the vacation is entirely the reason I'm not posting this at crazy late hours of the night hahaha

what year is it

ohhHHhhhboy its been a minute hasn't it? Well, I'm back home and me and the team are getting back into working on the game. We took a bit of a weekend break all together so I don't have much to show you but here comes .....

Alright, first on that list? The music I promised you!

While in Steamboat, I got a lot of interesting music sketches done, taking inspiration from Donkey Kong Country and good ol' Jimmy Buffet. Largely, though, all they were were sketches. The music editor I have on my phone for some reason doesn't let you adjust notes after you record them, and with no way to adjust that, I'm left to remake the good ones on my computer here. So I ended up spending way too much time today throwing together a new piece, but it's way too dark and entirely based on a certain joke that's absolutely garbage, Here it is!

clyp.it/d42sii4j?token=6910f8aa0174920ddc76c2521d7ccd92

I'll be changing that a LOT and posting the new stuff tomorrow - parts of that are gonna be turned into the cave music, and parts of that is gonna be the underwater music. Still thinking it might be too slow, so I'll probably speed it up or scrap it entirely. Until then though,

Gameplay:

Over the course of the weekend, the following was implemented!

• Barkley added collision layers, so that the monster couldn't pick up coins for you.
• Jimpy added a lootgen system  that picks 6-10 items from three catergories of loot: common (materials), uncommon (items), and rare. Each one is weighted differently.
• Jimpy made the fish attack you when it gets near, for now (since there's no health yet) it pushes you back when you touch it, and then "made the fishy not go light speed"
• Barkley added a certain collision box to differentiate between underwater and sky, so that the fishy can't leave the water, and so eventually the player won't be able to swim in the air.
• myserval struggled more with character movement, and then accidentally broke all the code so Jimpy had to go through and figure out how to revert git commits. oooooooops

ART:

nothin. sorry, no cool good visuals today! I'm gonna start working on a cave tileset tomorrow, and update the really bad sand sprites to be more like the rest of the dang game. Maybe more items and artifacts! 

See ya soon! Drink some water, you've probably gone too long without drinking water :)

And just like that, we're back to that late night posting grind  💪

Alright! Some dang stuff got did done today!

• Barkley implemented a basic shooting mechanic to kickstart weapon and combat mechanics
• Jimpy finalized the item generation for chests, added a pickup mechanic
• Barkley added the ability to call on a variable that distinguishes between air and water, and updated the physics of both to match
• Myserval updated the animation so that the old man won't swim if he's in the air
• Barkley made it so you can leave the diving screen
• Myserval programmed the basic sound system: it adds a filter to the sound when you're underwater, and plays sounds when you enter and leave the water. The gun also makes a really bad (really really bad) shooting sound effect. Music begins playing when you enter water.

Speaking of which, here's the new music!

clyp.it/uuifpzfj?token=7d930d13ab67c8a804089b5f238b6663

This is probably still not lighthearted enough, so this will become music for a more dangerous area. A different, lighter song will play instead (using similar instruments) in relatively peaceful waters.

Art!

............ still nothing. Myserval worked on the tiles today, but got a little sidetracked implementing the first sound effects. tiles r hard

Github presented more problems today, with godot getting really confusing and downright refusing to open our swimming scene. oops. it's fixed now but that was a solid 30 minutes of time wasted again. We've really gotta figure out how to not break our version control. 

oh and also

look for Salvage Pinball coming this fall to only green man gaming

It's go time! It's almost the end, it's ... 

I'm really gunning for any sort of funny pun or nothin' but I cant think of anything so here goes!

ART

Lots got done! Well, lots seemingly got done haha - I made three gun sprites and a bullet sprite, for shootin' stuff. 

The classic: Pistol, Rifle and Shotgun. Who knows if they'll all be used in the final game, but really, who cares- its fun anyways. Cave tiles got done too, but for now they're pretty non-organic:

I'm gonna spend tomorrow fixing those up and making about 20 different maps for the game to select when you go diving. 

Speaking of which, I haven't talked about how the game is changing. We sorta realized that with the amount of work we're putting in, it's really unlikely that a lot of our planned features will make it into the jam version. We're scrapping the salvaging mechanic. Ironic choice of words, but it's accurate. We may include it in a later version of the game, but likely we're gonna be changing the title of the game to reflect how the game now runs. Well, how it will run at release. We're fleshing out and completing the diving part of the game tomorrow so that we can begin working on how diving fits into the rest of the game. The leading possible replay ability mechanics are: Quests, Rogue-like or port trading. One of those (or possibly some left-field idea) is gonna become the reason for diving. We'll see what that becomes in about two days. 

More art!!

This radio sits on your boat and plays music while you're not underwater. Now with pretty particle effects!

And in the background? Thats right. the sky, boys and girls. It's sorta temporary, but for the jam, "it'll do."

MUSIC

Made..........stole..? a song to be used as the radio music. It's gonna be great. It's also been looping in the background the entire time i've been writing this devlog and somehow hasn't become annoying.

GAME

Along with the sky came parallax, and with that, some odd adjustments were made to how water was rendered. It looks good now! Myserval added breath and health counters and variables for the player, and made it so they count down appropriately.

With that, he added enemy health, and a basic counter above to display health.

And then, he added the sea urchin from before. Variety is the spice of lifeeeeeee

And for today, that's all! Tomorrow, there should be a finalized diving scene, including combat and picking up items. There also very well might be a bunch of different levels, but we'll see what becomes most important.

OH GOD THERE'S SO MUCH

That's the new boat sprite! and oh god there's a lot. 

• A random level is chosen and loaded each time the swimming scene is opened.
• 5 new levels were added (more to come for sure)
• walking up slopes is FINALLY fixed
• The overworld boat is now also a motorboat, and there's cool particles to match
• the player creates bubble particles in the water when they dive in.
• the sounds were made MUCH quieter.
• guns now do damage to enemies
• added skeletons
• Enemies release particles on death, and when they hit you, you have a certain number of I-frames
• wasd control support
• added a game over screen for when you die
• added a sword weapon
• Inventory now updates as you collect items, and the player node can sense when a new item is added, and give relevent effects to the player.  The delete button works as well.
• You can open and close the inventory in the diving screen ..... it doesn't actually show up yet (it's behind a bunch of layers) but it's there!

And with that, all the basic functionality of the diving mechanic is done! Now to .... add every item and have them appear in chests. But it's all there. the combat, the items, the movement- its all finally together. With ....... 48 hours left. Now time to add some sort of connecting mechanic!

I'll talk tomorrow (or the day after) about what that means for what we add, but ideally, we're gonna give some amount of meaningful context to the progression of the diving. 

Okay! So what's left?

• More Maps! Variety is the spice of life (that's gotta be the 100th time ive said that)
• Adding all of the items to the game. All of them. ALL OF THEM.
• Making more item sprites for the items!
• Cleaning up the folder structure. We don't need any of those dang kenney sprites anymore!
• Making the UI pretty all over (and scale properly)! It's still the default Godot look, and updating those is gonna be a great step in the feel of the game!
• Add a title theme
• Make the inventory visually open in the diving screen

Now, in stretch goals, things look a little different:

• Map Decor. Variety is, after all, the spice of life!
• New (better) cave tileset -  it looks very .... erm bad
• better enemy AI (they'll wander and so on, making them feel more lively)
• Making diving gear appear and disappear on the character sprite itself.
• who knows honestly my dude 

Oh! How could I forget? Jimpy made a splash screen :)))))))

wellllllllllllllllll that's all folks! I'll see you again tomorrow, where we'll finally be doing dinosaur/house transmutation~! bye!

Wow, alright. midnight already, huh?

It's the second to last day of the jam, right? So we're starting to get into polish mode.

First off, we got the inventory screen fully implemented in the diving part of the game. You press tab, and bam there it is. The game pauses and everything too!

All of the UI has been styled, and I added a basic main menu theme.

3 new items got added too!

Yeah yeah they're tiny yadda yadda you know the deal - it's too late to reupload them blah blah

All of the items now are in the item database, with flavortext to match.

tons of smaller bugs got fixed, like how the sword crashed the game if you were facing left.

we fixed this screen, as hard as it is to believe:

A couple new maps got added too- you'll see them when you play the game!

So goals for tomorrow, before the game goes live:

• Make the rest of the items affect the player.
• Add UI for player health and breath and enemy health.
• Add map decorations.
• Pick and implement a mechanic to add replayability. (maybe? its sorta getting too close, isn't it?)
• General polish: testing and making sure there's no edge cases.
• Make the itch.io page, complete with logo and everything

Good luck to everyone else too! I know some of you guys have already submitted your games (oh jeez) so hopefully the testing and bugfixing stage goes well! I'm looking forward to playing them :)

Day 14:

We Do It