Now that it's 4 days in, I figured it's probably a good time to start writing a proper devlog. This isn't my first time doing a game jam, but it's been a long time since my last one. I've started and ending up dropping so many game dev projects and jams over the past few years, and the only game I've ever finished and published was a short platformer called Extendobot for a Gameboy-jam a few years ago.
I always end having extremely grand ideas, so I'm really trying my best to limit the scope of this project and not hurt myself with feature creep. I decided to go with a top- down exploration game, since I wanted an excuse to try making a sprite stacking "fake 3d" engine in Game Maker Studio. I'm taking the cold theme literally, with the player having to constantly search for a new source of warmth in a cold and uncaring environment. I looked a lot at Nium, Titan Souls, and Hyper Light Drifter for inspiration
1/25 - 1/26
The first 2 days of the jam I mostly spent digging up old code for the 3d rendering and looking up youtube tutorials. I had a hard time getting the layering and depth sorting to work out properly, but eventually I was able to get it to a point I was happy with.
1/27
Monday I didn't have a massive amount of time to work, but I did fix up the rendering a bit more to support flat billboarded sprites and drew a better sprite for the player character.
1/28
Tuesday was a bust. I spent all of my time trying to get the player to move in the proper direction relative to the camera. (Pressing left moves the player left with respect to the screen, not left with regards to the engines XY axes.) The only thing of note I did was draw sprites for all 4 directions the player can face.
That's where I stand as of right now. By tonight I'd like to get this movement issue sorted out, so I can start to work on more actual content. I'll also need to come up with a title for the game at some point. I'll also update these screenshots with higher resolution ones when I get the chance. Thanks to anybody that bothered reading through all this rambling!
Edit:Looks like the pictures didn't upload properly, or at least I can't see them on my phone. I'll need to fix those later if they don't show up for anyone else either.
Edit 2: Pictures Fixed?