Hi, I'm Corndog, and I decided for my first actual project that I would join this game jam. Over the last 4 days I have put a lot of effort into my game and wanted to document the process of developing it. Pre-Jam:
All of my pre-jam work was coming up with ideas and trying to build up a system for how to create the game I wanted to make. I had boards and charts and everything for this but eventually came to like the idea of almost a warioware-like game, where each microgame sees you doing something related to "healing". There isn't much to talk about here so moving on..
Day 1:
Day one was agony. Two important things about my situation I have not mentioned would be
1. I am a team of one
2. I CANNOT DRAW FOR THE LIFE OF ME
So GENERALLY speaking I would probably not make the art first, logically, right? WRONG. I do things on impulse and impulse only and if my impulse says "Hey. Draw a character for the game," then who am I to say no? So upon getting to work I immediately decided that the character would be a simple Stick man, animated accordingly to this Blackthornprod video. So for a normal person, this would maybe take, 10 minutes, maybe, all in all.
It took me over an hour.
So with that out of the way I got to animating in unity making a simple standing around and looking at a clipboard animation and a "shocked/wowza" animation for when the minigame changes. That was ALL of day one. It ended up turning out ok but it was still a LONG process.
Oh yeah, the game will also apparently having a doodly-paper theme to it, because what do you expect me to do? Make high quality art? Never.
Day 2:
Day 2 looking back on it is just a tad fuzzy. I remember finishing up some animations and finishing up coding on the main screen and then going "hmm.. how do I make all the code without the first minigame??" and so, again, I listened to my ape monkey brain and started work on the first minigame. The first minigame I decided to make as simple as possible, a big heart, that you have to click to pump. Genius, I know. So with that out of the way I finished up a lot of the code and sailed onwards.
Day 3:
I WAS LAZY. I DIDN'T GET A LOT DONE. What I did do, however, was make a timer (which turned out to be SUPER easy) and learn about DATA PERSISTENCE. I didn't much like data persistence but a lot of the game relies on THIS fundamental knowledge. If I were unable to save data this would be more of a minigame compilation than it already is. Moving onto a much more full day, however..
Day 4: AKA, Today. This was the most productive day so far, however, I STILL HAVENT MADE ANY MORE MINIGAMES, LIKE, AT ALL. So I'm feeling a little pressure from that. What did I do however? Well
I'm glad you asked.
I polished EVERY CORNER I COULD FIND. I really REALLY pushed for "no more work outside of minigames" today. Most of these were simple, make a new scene and decorate it or convert this string to text, but then. Then this came.
SPEED UP.
This sounded simple even to me, and it was simple. For a time. I tried and tried and TRIED to get it to work with the game but it would always return "undefined" or "infinity". I was stuck with this for TWO. HOURS. Luckily, MFGJ has a discord thats decently active, so I asked them. I had MULTIPLE people helping me and it was only until one kind, brave soul suggested "uh, could you define it as a float variable again??" From every point of view I can see this should have changed NOTHING, but SOMEHOW, it worked. It finally worked and I was more angry than before because WHY DID IT WORK.
After this, I decided to dedicate an hour to whining about that and then the next two hours adding the speed up animation and making the level transition look better.
So, thats all for now. I plan on doing one of these every 4 days throughout the jam. Please consider playing my game when its released at the end of the jam!
P.S. I am so sorry about the poor image quality there is nothing I can do to fix it.