Hello everyone, it’s the dev behind the lowest-rated game in last year’s game jam! Obviously I didn’t really know what I was doing a year ago: I started late, was still learning the basics of Godot, and started thinking about assets way too late, leading to a game that was visibly incomplete. However, things are different this time—two weeks into the last jam I barely knew what I wanted to do, but two weeks into this jam I have most of my game logic completed and am close to a barebones implementation. I’m still learning Godot, and I still haven’t really thought about assets yet (if you want to help, DM me on the discord), but I’m overall much further along this time.

The basic idea of my game is that you’re a new employee at The Smoke Box and it turns out the food is made via this grid implanted in the counter, and you click and place various food items and buildings onto the grid, and they eventually make the items you serve to the customer. Here’s a basic walkthrough of the gameplay loop as you make a hamburger: raising the cow into beef in a field, then putting it and a bun from the warehouse on the grill to make the burger.

There’s lots of logic here, and I like the code outside of the UI (which is still one messy script, though I know where I would split it in the final script). The UI is also where a lot of my current bugs are—you may have noticed weird highlighting behavior, a consequence of Tiles mixing both logic and UI stuff. If you’re interested I have all my code public on Github, and you might get a hint at some of the few features I have left before I work on final look-and-feel and just making more content—making things cost money is coming, as is an actual story (which I have pieces of right now in my head). There’s also one more feature that’s mostly implemented I’ll keep a secret for now—you’ll notice there was another placeable I didn’t use in the video, and I put things on a grid for a reason.

Cool idea! I'll be interested to check this game out!~

With a little over a week left in the game jam (and only one Kyle stream beforehand), I suppose it’s time to give another update. Let’s start with the video this time:

So yes, the basic foundation of the game remains the same, but there are more bells and whistles. Obviously I have cutscenes now, even if they’re relatively bland (those pictures can change based on the speaker, and there will hopefully be a background in the final game). The game scene also is in a closer-to-final state, with stuff moved around and a fancy new popup for the tile info. There’s also a currency, as buildings and food cost money now, and each shows its cost dynamically on the buttons.

So what else needs to be done in the week or so left?

• Lots of art needs to be found and/or made. You can see I’ve found a lot of free-use food icons out on the web, though I haven’t focused on buildings yet. I also need a plan for the backgrounds and unique characters—whether they’re lucky finds or Paint abominations has yet to be determined. That doesn’t even include things like the generic buttons or flat popups. Again, if you want to help make stuff, let me know on the discord!
• I need to create the levels—the plan is for there to be the tutorial (which you saw the first part of in the video), and then either two or three story levels (each with a beginning and ending cutscene), and then hopefully an endless mode. The framework for creating levels is easy now that I have all the pieces, it’s just a lot of grunt work of creating Food/Building resources to put in the levels, writing cutscenes, and of course finding/making the related art assets.
• That mystery feature I teased in the last entry doesn’t look like it’s going to happen—it involves pathing using AStarGrid, and while I got the feature to work at a basic level surprisingly easily, it doesn’t work right past the basics, and then there’s a lot of actual connection to the game logic that might be harder than it looks. I’d be shelving it no questions asked, but my limited story is built around it existing, so I still want to try—but it’s still very on the back-burner unless I get a major breakthrough (or again, help from someone who knows what’s going on).

I don’t know if there will be another update, but maybe, if I actually get art I like in the game (or that feature working) I’ll do more.