Exciting stuff! This is my upcoming entry to the Sondering Emily x Juliestrator Jam, my first Game Jam here on itch.io in some time. While my goal is primarily to make and finish a game, I'm also trying to use this opportunity to force myself to post more devlogs, something I'm notorious for neglecting. This will eventually be crossposted to the game page when it is published!

Concept:

The theme of the game is "home", and I decided to run with the first concept that came to me since it's such a short jam; basically it will be a logic puzzle game where you drop little dormice families into empty houses. You have to place each dormouse into a room with their stuff, and most dormice will be sharing a room, so you have to place them with family members they can tolerate.  I based this idea on my personal experience with the idea of "home"; for most of my life I've had to cohabitate with strangers, and negotiating that can be tricky. Originally it was going to be about placing mice in a dorm, but I was worried that wouldn't fit the theme. So now it's just a big family of mice in one house!

22 Hours To Go...

• ✅come up with concept
• ✅build basic prototype
• ✅get working mouse object
• ✅get working furniture object
• ✅have mice express opinions (missing stuff, unhappy with roommate, happy with room)
• ✅concept out 3 levels
• 🐭get prototype of level 1 working
• 🐭build out 3 levels
• 🐭have finished level transition into next
• 🐭start screen
• 🐭end screen
• 🐭music/sounds
• 🐭pixel art of everything
• 🐭quick bug test
• 🐭quick polish pass

I've got to hit the hay, but here's what I accomplished this evening (not bad for like 3 hours work!)

Progress:

Because so much of the game relies on grid placement, I built a small prototype to make sure I can get that to work. I am happy with it so far!

Apparently there's a cool way you can do grid placement using ds_grids, but since I didn't have time to learn how they work I did some simple janky math to get the dormouse to align with a grid any time it was picked up or dropped.(I am referring to the mice as dormice so that they are easy to differentiate between the actual desktop mouse, both here and in my code because I know I will get them mixed up otherwise!)

The dormouse can also check what it is being dropped on, so two objects can't be dropped on top of eachother.

The last thing I'm going to do tonight is bang out my to-do list for the next 48 hours, which is now in the top post. Tomorrow I'm going to a pinball convention with a friend, so I'll have even LESS time to work on this thing! hope I can finish it in time!

So excited to read more! Thanks for sharing :)

Workin' Under The Hood

Wow, what a day! I spent the morning starting to build a furniture object, and then I hopped in the car with a friend of mine to go to a local pinball convention (I totally forgot I bought tickets like a month ago). I had a lot of fun but I was worried that I'd have less time to work on my game. During lunch I was able to grab a notebook and quickly block out each level, so progress still happened while I was out having fun. As a quick adjustment, I decided to drop the puzzle levels from 5 to 3; hopefully this will still come off as a complete game experience!

after the pinball convention and a quick power nap, I finished the basic mechanics of my game. Mice now can identify if their friends, enemies, and all their furniture are in the same room with them and have a mood depending on how those factors turn out. This was definitely the most finicky part to figure out. I still have quite a bit of programming ahead of me before I get to the art (which is my strong suit) but it's more about building out the levels at this stage. The screenshot above doesn't look like much compared to yesterday but there is so much more work that I did under the hood!

the last thing I did this evening was set up the game rooms for tomorrow. I have a rudimentary start screen, and a game manager who will check the status of all the dormice and trigger an end event when they are all in a room and happy. First thing I'm going to do tomorrow is finish the manager, then build, build build!

Just published (with like, an hour and a half to go)! I am really happy I got to submit something, but I am too tired to describe all the work I did; I'm going to write a postmortem tomorrow. Congrats to everyone who also submitted, very looking forward to playing y'all's game!