Blog #00 - Introduction

About us

Hey there. My pal, Praytic, asked me if I'd like to participate in this game jam, and I said, sure, let's do it. While he's busy setting up our project, I was tasked with writing our first blog post.

Let's talk about ourselves a little first, shall we? Our team consists of Praytic, Kvel2D, and myself, Mori. All three of us hail from Russia, and are former classmates, though at the moment we're all located in California.

Praytic and me are Java engineers by profession, working in the noxious environments of enterprise Java development, though that could hardly be called our passion. Kvel, on the other hand, has been up until this point lucky enough to not have dipped his toes into the toxic mess of corporate bullshit. Good for him, I'm envious.

We've all dabbled in various gamedev-related things in the past to some extent, and all being engineers of various caliber, I wouldn't exactly call ourselves amateurs, but I can't say we have anything to show off. This game jam is our proper first foray into both game jams, and gamedev in general.

But enough about us. What did we settle on making?

About our project

Praytic pitched me an idea that I quite liked. Take the core concepts behind automation-centric games like Factorio etc., juggle them a bit, simplify, and put it into a mobile game. This idea immediately appealed to me, because I myself have poured countless hours into tech-modded Minecraft and Factorio, and in the past I've myself pondered about what I could bring to the table if I worked on a game like that.

So that's what we're settling on, a mobile game about automating the heck out of everything, with as many unique twists as we can throw onto it by the deadline.

We've decided to call it Automatic.

Our language of choice for the game itself is Kotlin, using LibGDX for all the game-enginey stuff, as well for it's good cross-platform support.

In addition to that, we want to add a real-time component to the game, so that a player's world can continue to progress (it's a game about automation, after all!) even when they aren't directly playing the game. For that, we're going to have a server-side component written in Rust.

What's happening right now?

We've spent this day rolling ideas back and forth and setting up a bare minimum LibGDX project for us to get something going. Not much else has happened. We all plan to meet up on Saturday and discuss things in more depth, work out the game mechanics that we want, etc.

i've watched bits of factorio and it's honestly sooo faaascinating to watch. i can't wait to see what your game looks like in motion!

Blog #01 - One week later...

Todo list

On the next two days we started to think up on the ideas for the game. What mechanics we should make, what should be the game-end condition, how to make an average user want play our game and etc. We came out with a plan to create a google sheet todo list with all ideas and pick those which were able to implement during the jam's timeline. All were solid ideas which would form a great and simple game. However knowing almost nothing about technologies that we picked, the realistic approach was to create at least playable game. So after picking up core functionality for our game from the todo list, we started to learn the framework which we are going to use (libktx). 

How is development going? 

After weekends we already had the basis for our game - menu and game screens. Not much, but it honest work. Due to our time-consuming work duties Mori and I had to work on the game about 2-3 hours per two days. So the main developer, who also had an experience in game development, was our friend Kvel2D. Unless having little experience with Kotlin he was able to implement map generation functionality in a day. Of course, Mori and I, who soaked though in an enterprise development, were kinda concerned on styling our code, so we spent a lot of time on correcting our friend's code. 

While I was working on designing textures and icons for our game, others were busy with the programming stuff. When I finally was finished with the activity, I could finally start coding things. My attempts on implementing HUD for the game were not so successful as I expected. It required for me a lot of hours to understand how it works in libktx. Finally, by the end of the week I was able to handle this thing... while Kvel2D implemented almost all the main game features.

Why no daily updates?

So the main reason why our daily updates were not in place, is because our writer Mori had too much work on his shoulders even after the working hours. Besides that he needs to move to another place by the end of the week. So he has even less time than me to work on a game and write the blog at the same time. However our progress is still going and we plan to show something playable at the of the jam. Peace.