Hi folks!

I am 100% new to itch.io and to gamemaking in general. I initially thought I'd just vaguely follow this game jam and enjoy playing some of the results, but then I had an idea partway through the week and figured I'd give it a go.

I'm going to make a Twine game called Gopher Heart that's pretty much a playable version of one of my earliest childhood memories. It will be a little bit sweet and a little bit gruesome, which I think encapsulates a lot of childhood. I've never worked with Twine before, but I really love playing Twine games and I've wanted to learn how to design in Twine for a while now. I'm happy that the beginners game jam is giving me an excuse to finally work on that!

So far I have the game about 80% scripted and have very rough concept sketches for most of the artwork, but haven't started any of the coding. I also need to figure out what kind of art style will let me finish the illustrations in a comfortable, timely manner. Once I have some digital art tests done, I'll post them here so folks can get a clearer sense of the style I'm going for.

Looking forward to following other people's game design processes and seeing what everybody makes!

Making progress on plugging my now 95% completed script into Twine! It looks like this so far.

I still have almost zero knowledge of CSS, so that's the main thing that's hanging me up right now. Trying to figure out how to install other people's macros into Twine to do some very basic edits to the visual formatting of my game, but I'm finding the basics of that process awkwardly tough to figure out, even with Googling/using resource links from the game jam.

Script is complete! I figured out the very tiny bits of CSS I needed to add some delayed display effects to key pieces of text, thanks to support from folks in the Text forum for this jam. Now my only priority is doing the illustrations - that's going to be my main work up until the deadline. I'll try to do a WIP art post tomorrow.

Art is in progress now! You can check it out here. Trying to decide if I want to focus more in refining these pictures, or on expanding the number of pictures overall.