Hello everyone!

This will both be the first time I will be joining a game jam and making a game (Though I have very basic knowledge of coding and made a few small scale experiments before). Mostly, this project will serve as a way for me to understand and apply the basics of coding/programming, and I thought that making some sort of game will also be a fun way of doing that. I’ve chosen Godot as the game engine that I will be using, and the plan is to make a 2D Puzzle Platformer involving travelling back and forth between the past and the present.

The first two days were dedicated to getting the basic stuff added in:

• Player control
• Simple enemy movement
• (Admittedly bad) Art for the tiles, sprites, and background
• Time travel mechanic

Today, I have focused on creating the UI of the player as well as a basic main menu:

The next priority for the next few days will be building the levels that the player will be in. Hopefully by next week I can start adding in music/sounds, and adding a few more miscellaneous things if I still have the time.

Spent a little bit of time changing a small part of the texture used by the floating platforms. This will hopefully mean that they are more easily identifiable. The idea for them is that they are normally staying in place with their power being supplied by the facility the game will be taking place in. In the present time period, this area is already in ruins, and so with no power, the platforms drop down from their past location.

Aside from that, I also managed to implement at least a functional pause menu to the game.

...A bit of a slow day, but small progress is still progress! The biggest thing slowing me down iis designing the levels and figuring out what other secondary mechanics I can consider to maybe add more complexity, but I guess I have to start small for now.

Looks cool man!

After a bit of fighting against bugs and errors in the scripts, I managed to implement gates/doors I can potentially use throughout the levels. While it was quite simple to just move the door to the open position when the player presses the button, I wanted to have at least some form of opening and closing animation which was initially quite buggy and would insist on moving diagonally instead of vertically, but after a few minutes of desperate googling troubleshooting, I was able to make it do what I want it to do. In hindsight, there might have been a better way of implementing the up and down movement of the door which would have been much quicker than my method, but for now it works.

I then worked on the menus again, and added in a functional (though barebones) settings menu.

Finally, I also made a bouncepad for the player. When it is powered, the player is able to jump much higher than the normal jump height.

Well then, you just can't expect everything to go smoothly all the time... For the past few days I wasn't able to do much else as I spent a lot of time troubleshooting and fixing hardware issues on my end. Of course this is why I always try to keep backups (yay!) and so after many hours of OS installations and messing around, I'm finally able to get back to working on this.

Since there isn't too much time left before the end of the week, I unfortunately had to scale back some plans I had in order for me to be able to finish this and submit before the deadline. Thus the remainder of the progress I will be working towards will mostly be focused on bug fixing and very small additions.

I finally added in sounds to the game. There are now sound effects for movement, interactions etc. Aside from quick sound effects, simple ambient sounds for both the past and present are added in. I then went back to the first screen and created instructions for how to play the game.

The plan from now on then is bug fixing to make sure that it is actually possible to at least finish the game, after that is checking if the exported build will run. I could then probably call it finished and submit it. Hoping that no more problems arise!

I just finished submitting the game!

https://itch.io/jam/my-first-game-jam-summer-2020/rate/710051

It felt like a long 2 weeks, but I am really glad that I am able to create a project and see it through from start to finish. Is the game good? I'd say not really, but it definitely was a good learning experience for me. I have learned a lot of things through this jam, including a better understanding of how game development works, the processes involved, and what my strengths and weaknesses are.

This was definitely an enjoyable two weeks for me, and I wish good luck to those in the process of finishing their games! I would like to check out the submissions some time soon.