Hi.

This is my first jam and I hope to create my first finished game.  I want it to be super simple as I will work on the game after work, 2-3 hours a day. I have almost no experience in game dev and just started learning pixel art. I'm learning Unity and have a puzzle game in progress, but I got stuck on how many assets I need there. I participate in this jam with two goals:

1. I want to practice pixel art every day and learn how to do animations
2. I want to try out Construct and check if it is something worth my time and maybe money

Scurry Scramble will be a 2D platformer about a squirrel running around the backyard and startling birds so it can steal all the food from the birdfeeder. 

I was brainstorming ideas for a game about birds that are sitting on wires - because all I can draw in pixel art is a bird and wires are just lines :D The jam theme - cycles - was super inspiring for me! I came up with the idea that I could make a level that goes around the fence of the yard and there are birds sitting around. The player is running around trying to scare off as many of them as fast as possible. And then I remembered a video from Mark Rober about squirrels in his yard and bam - the player will be a squirrel and seed and nuts will be the price :)

For my first day, I plan to do mockup sprites and decide on resolution and start setup in Construct. I also need to watch some tutorials on Construct as all I did this far was Construct guide tour.

Day 1:

Today I managed to set up the scene and create some basic player behaviors, but I'm not convinced it will work well.

1. I decided on a resolution of 854 x 480px. I took the great tit image I created recently and decided to use its shape as a placeholder for the smallest bird in the game.  I chose sizes in reference to that. I also painted this "masterpiece" of a squirrel , other things in the scene are just rectangles for now.
2. I made wires and fences with jumpthru behavior, the ground is solid. The player has a platform and wrap behaviors. I'm not sure if I approached well the issue of running around the same scene - wrap on the player, unbound scrolling on layout, and camera following the player on x-axis. It forced me to extend sprites outside layout to look good and I think it probably would be a problem if I want to put birds near to the screen cut. I see most games in which the player is constantly moving, are made in a way that the player stays in place and surrounding moves but I have absolutely no idea how to move a scene that is not randomly generated in such a way.
3.  I made my player run with a system event every tick and stimulating controls depending on mirrored and not-mirrored properties of the player. And made the player fall down on pressing the down arrow.
4. I created a page for my game as a prototype and draft You can check it out: https://concreteberry.itch.io/scurry-scramble?secret=FfC67BoWhYbKDtUpl0EQLq3cYuA

At this point, my work looks like this:

This all took quite a lot of docs reading. I'm also on 4th lesson of this A Beginner's Guide to Construct 3 - tutorial

Day 2:

What I did today:

1. I tweaked the resolution and layout size a bit so it is easier to create an outside part of the layout that looks like part of the layout to create smooth wrap behavior. 
2. Spend way too much time figuring out if it might be possible to put birds near layout edges and have not found the solution for that. It means in the game I will have a "no bird zone" of width one viewport. Frustrating, but I do not want to get completely stuck on that, so ignoring it for now.
3. Added some birds to scare off and mockup of UI. Also added a game loop with food being eaten every 3s - the more birds on the scene more gets eaten.
4. Added mockups of the title screen and "game over" and "you won" screens.
5. Updated the game on my draft page 

Day 3

Today I finally sat down before aseprite to start thinking about the art I'm going to need for this game. I only know that I want something a bit cartoonish, for sure with an outline.  For now, I have this sparrow   I think I need to start with some color palette to make my work easier I had a hard time picking up colors for this bird.

My plans for the next few days are to do all animations that are needed or at least mockups - squirrel running, jumping up jumping down, and maybe idle. Two birds jumping around animation and fly away animation for each. It is going to be a lot to learn as I never did animation before.

I see your progress on your game so far and want to say, good luck! I'll check back up on this from time to time as I still need to work on mine, (and maybe look at other people's projects).

Day 4

Today was all about struggling with art. I asked questions on Discord as I struggled to decide how big the pixels on my sprite should be.

I remake my sparrow in two different resolutions and tried to draw a squirrel - it is simple but before adding some shadows texture and shadows I want to check if I will be able to animate it so it could run.

Day 6 and day 7

I took a little break on day 5 and spent most of the days 6 and 7 afternoons watching animation tutorials, looking for references, and trying to animate my sprites.

Day 8 

Today I managed to finish all my animations and put them in the game.

I made a running amination for my squirrel   for fall and jump I just use one frame from run animation. 

For a bird, I have 3 animations: idle, jump and fly. Idle and jump share 2 frames. 

 I made my birds randomly hop around. How cute is that?!

As of now, I have all movement logic in place for both the player and the birds, so I can start designing levels, hurray :)

You can of course check out my progress on my game draft page:  https://concreteberry.itch.io/scurry-scramble?secret=FfC67BoWhYbKDtUpl0EQLq3cYuA

Day 9

Level designing :D

I decided that I will have the same backyard for every level but the birds will differ in number and placement. Each level will have some additional objects that will help move between the ground fence and the power wires (it won't be possible in one jump). I started with planning my yard on paper. 

As the fence and the wires are repeatable I decided to learn how to use time maps.

Started drawing the first screen in aseprite:

And then added fence elements to the tilemap.

I cleaned up my scene and created a tilemap. I do not have any collisions on its elements - I decided I will put invisible jumpthru and solid sprites in places where it is needed. Also added green and blue placeholders for things I do not have designed yet. This is how my level looks in construct editor:

My list of things I need to draw is long:

• all house tiles
• the pole with the lamp the lamp
• the tree
• the gate
• for both gates, I want to add open view
• flower bed
• the bush
• background
• some extra objects: the garbage can, drying rack, bucket, and upper part of a truck parked behind the fence
• design for screens between levels

I'm starting to feel time pressure :/

Cool theme, cute birds.

Day 10

Today I found a bug. I used the system event "every x second" to count the time to dispatch lowering the seed level action. I was not aware that is tied to game global time not layout/level time. As a result on level 2 the food was eaten just after the level started. To fix this I set a timer that counts that time on my seed object. And since I was changing things around the feeder and seed meter, I decided to do proper sprite. For the seeds, I used a background tile element from Construct that repeats one tile of background on an element of any size. This is how it looks:

Day 11 - today

Sorry for not updating. I struggled to find enough time to draw. But I did it! My art got simpler and simpler every day. I did not practice any pixel art techniques but at least I drew everyday. Lat two weeks I spend over 40h in aseprite. I'm already thinking of making a new edition of this game with better art.

Most important - I SUBMITED THE GAME! https://concreteberry.itch.io/scurry-scramble 

This is the first time I finished a side project and I'm super happy. 

This is how it looks:

It has 5 levels, I added music I found on freesound.org. It is a very small but complete thing :)

This was my first jam but for super not last.

If you have any questions about my process I will be happy to answer!

See You!