Day 0, an unexpected yet welcome problem

Everybody wants to join our team! The legendary founder of our Crowdforge started it before I joined, but hasn't been seen since. Religions have got going on worse origin stories than this.

I was pleasantly surprised how quickly we came to an agreement about tools. C# it is, and most likely Monogame. 

My autocorrect thinks of this as 'Monogamy.' Could make for lively journalling.

There are some great open-source libraries out there we'd like to integrate. Do they all have C# bindings? If not, interop in C# is reasonably straightforward but could be time-consuming.

And the theme is… love! OK, wasn't uppermost in our discussion but I'm sure we can work with it.

Day 1, attack of the killer concept art

Since I didn't draw it, I reckon I can safely say our concept art looks amazing!

Day 2, version 0.000001

We explored our core mechanic using a text-only model. It made us nostalgic for the days of text adventures.

Graphics and sound are going to play major roles in the finished product, but stunning video and audio can't compensate for lack of fun. This game is going to be fun. We're hoping for a cute twist on the dungeon crawler, for replayability through demands on the player's reactions, and for a choice of goals instead of a walking simulator.

hey there! you can go ahead and post replies to your devlog thread--we don't mind double posts at all especially if they're daily updates to your game. it would be pretty awesome to see some visuals, even if theyre just small gifs of your progress. looking forward to seeing it!

It's so interesting to see a team think about making an Open World Game. I wish the best of luck to you and your team!

Haha, I wouldn't be surprised if the world didn't close down quite a lot in the final hours before the deadline!

Day something, unexpected challenges

There are all sorts of issues you should really resolve before a game jam. I was getting a poor wifi connection via the USB adapter on my Windows box. Today my new powerline adapters arrived. Some people dislike powerline as a prehistoric technology, but it just works and doesn't give me unfathomable error messages. It's all about removing distractions so you can concentrate on the code.

Another challenge is distributing test builds. Other game jammers are a savvy bunch, but our playtesters have had a few issues with extracting zipped files and maintaining the proper hierarchy so the executable can find the resource directory. If power users stumble, what can we expect of casual gamers? I wonder how we can signal requirements of this sort, especially when nobody reads READMEs. There are plenty of principles, but no standards I can think of short of app stores.

Day The End, we did it!

A rollercoaster ride and no mistake, but at the end of it all we have some code we could easily continue to work on, because it hasn't gone all spaghetti.

We even managed a cutscene to set the scene. (Am I the only one who used to think cutscenes were naughty bits that had been removed by the censor? Almost certainly.)

Special shoutout to Edo who DID NOT GIVE UP. That's probably a more important lesson than anything I learned about entity component systems, and certainly a more comprehensible one.

Please play our game and let us know what you make of it. We set out to make this a rhythm game, but early feedback suggests it's become more about reactions. You be the jury.