For years I thought it'd be fun to try out game making, and I even got an old copy of gamemaker back in a old humble bumble, but getting myself to sit down and work on it has been a hard thing to do. I signed up to be notified about this jam years ago, but every time it came up, I always seemed to have something going on that I would use as a justification to not participate. This year I do have things that will eat up my free time, but I think I have a bit more willpower this time around to see it through despite the other things going on in my life. 

My copy of Gamemaker is old enough that it's no longer getting updated (V1.4). I'm not sure if that's gonna be a source of any trouble in the future, but I think it should be fine for this jam. This jam for me is all about figuring out a work process that I like and learning some basic coding that's related to a more ambitious game idea I've had in mind. If I can at least figure out a work flow, then I'll be happy. I think if I can get the code for that down in the 1st week, then I could maybe use the 2nd week to give it some polish and make a short standalone that's hopefully at least interesting to check out. We'll see how that plan works out!

The mechanic I have in mind is your character will be chased around by enemies who can hurt you, and you can fight back and run away. If you put on a disguise, however, then all the enemies become friendly NPCs that you can actually talk to. The instant your disguise is gone, whether you take it off by choice or it comes apart by accident, the NPCs will immediately become hostile and attack again. I originally came up with this concept for a RPG horror game idea, but for this jam it's gonna be a lot more light hearted. I thought this standalone demo would be a fun chance to use a Satyr Girl I drew for fun earlier this  year, as pictured below.

The basic plot would be her trying to leave the hellscape she lives in with her family to go to a more heavenly place that she thinks she'd fit in better with. In this case, the enemies 'attacking' her might be relatives and neighbors badgering her about leaving. The disguise would be her appearing like the more typical satyrs in the area, and no one bothers her as they think she's finally stopped being all weird and conformed. There's probably gonna be a line from a old lady going 'oh you look so much better in red dearie!'

I planned just to start with the basics today, set up the room, a few sprites, a walking mechanic. I ended up discovering something unusual about Gamemaker, however. 

https://imgur.com/a/bl75qGT (Sorry, I'm new to capturing gifs as well, and the files I get are too large to upload directly in itchio. I'm still troubleshooting, but for now I'll link to gifs in imgur)

Before the jam, I was reviewing some Gamemaker guides on youtube, and I made a test project to practice alongside in. I had no intention of using any of this test code in the jam, but then as I was setting up my Jam file, I wanted to pull up my old test project to refer to something. Apparently if you have a open project in GM and you pull up a different GM project, instead of opening up a new screen for just that different project, that different project combines with your open project. I'm not sure if I did anything extra, or if it's a quirk of GM 1.4, but I ended up writing over my original Jam setup work with my old project. Whoops! I'm Very Glad I learnt all of this now, and not a week from now. 

As a plus side, a lot of the walking code is in place! I'm keeping the test bullet code in place for now, since I might be able to refer to and rework that code to be a different sort of attack. 

https://imgur.com/a/wZu4Eul

I was originally planning for a more  RPG feel where walking is based on tiles, but I like how smooth this test walk turned out. I think it might work out better for the mechanic I had in mind, so I'm keeping it as is for now. This room will be the starting point where the Satyr girl decides to leave home. I'll need to update the background, make her parents into actual objects, and set up more room boundaries. If I can get a new room to load when she walks right, and maybe even set up the corner where she can put on her disguise, that would be some good progress.  It might also be a good chance to get text boxes set up so the  talking mechanic is in place.

Sorry for the lengthy post! I doubt all of my devlogs will be this in-depth, especially during the work week. I'm hoping to have at least a little bit of progress each day, however! 

Man, when I first made this topic I had some hope that I might be able to do regular updates. What ended up happening is that between work and family, I had a limited amount of time to work on the game, and most of that time was dedicated to just wrapping my head around figuring out how to code what I wanted.

I'm familiar with some basics of coding logic, but it's been a struggle to figure out how to piece everything together. There's a lot of guides online, which I definitely used heavily and was incredibly useful. An issue I kept running into, however, is discovering that an approach/code one guide touted as the way to achieve this action ends up being limiting if I want to do something else. I first encountered it when I was coding the walking, but the more devastating example was the dialogue. 

It took me a long time to figure out how to have dialogue for different characters that the player could scroll through. A lot of guides I was using did not seem to offer much help; they either showed how to have a single line of text appear once, without any changes, or they had their text display in unusual methods that I did not want. When I finally came across a guide that seemed to offer what I wanted to achieve, and even explained the logic of the steps that I could follow along, I was so happy. With the dialogue finally working, I was ready to do the next step I wanted to learn: making dialogue choices the player could choose from. The original guide I used did not cover dialogue choices, so I had to look elsewhere. Nearly every guide I found mentioned it would be easiest to have all the dialogue in an array. I realized that the code I was using for the dialogue worked with the idea that every bit of text turned into a queue. 

At this point I had 3 options: I could redo my dialogue code entirely, starting from scratch, I could wrack my brain for hours to see if I could find ways to make dialogue choices with a queue, or I could give up on dialogue choices entirely and just have the player choose between 2 objects to change the end. This was near the very end of the jam, so guess what I ended  up choosing.

My past me would be disappointed that I wasn't able to implement something as seemingly simple as dialogue choices, but at least by making the choices into a physical thing you choose between, it leads to my favorite bit of dialogue in this demo game:

This game jam ended up being a really good lesson in scale; I knew I wouldn't be able to do my -dream game-, but I thought my originals plans were attainable. I underestimated just how much time it would take for me to get a handle on the basics of coding in gamemaker, or the variety of different approaches people take to coding what you think are extremely  basic game mechanics. Maybe if I didn't have my job or if my family wasn't around I would have been able to get farther along in my original plan, but I do like having a steady salary job and I do enjoy my family. I'm glad that I was able to have a complete game package at the end, with players able to get different endings.

As difficult as it was, doing the coding for this game has been super rewarding. I feel like I'm taking actual steps to bringing some of my game ideas to life, and that makes me really excited. I think it would be nice to keep on working on this game to see if I can make my original plans for it into a reality. If I could enact my original vision for this game, while making the code a bit smoother & organized in a way that makes my brain happy, I think it would be an excellent demo for the more ambitious game idea I had. 

All in all: I'm really glad I finally pushed myself to do this!! I wanna keep it up!!