Hey folks,

I'm gonna document our progress on our jam submission here. Hopefully this is helpful or at least interesting!

So, current progress is 0% but typically I start one of these jams by writing out all the themes on note cards and I organize those cards into piles.

Here's a video of my brainstorming sesh the first time I did this jam:

And the brainstorming session from the second time:

Once my brain fog has cleared a little bit I'm gonna do the same thing with the current jam's themes. In fact I could maybe get anywhere from 0.25% to 0.75% of my progress completed by writing out those index cards tonight! That seems like a good goal.

In other jam news we now have a lovely cover image for the jam contributed by my friend and Space Kings artist Bryan Shepherd!

I love it. Feels like we're the real deal now.

The Introduce Yourself/LFG topic is bumpin' right now, so go and say hi if you feel like it!

If you'd also like to document your progress, feel free to start your own topic in the community section of the jam. I'd love to see what you're working on!

Alright that feels like a post! I'll catch you later.

KC

Alright, brainstorming has been accomplished!

In general I like it when I have clear mechanics in mind instead of just "a game in a genre." Genre games tend to become massive projects ("I have to make a good stealth game!") and mechanics games tend to be more achievable ("I have to explore this one cool mechanic and then get out.")

The current idea has no clear genre yet but I have a couple of mechanics that I want to explore.

I think my next steps are:
1. Find a color palette
2. Start writing some code

From there I can kind of start cobbling together the look and feel of the thing, nail down the mechanics, and then hopefully exit the month with something playable to polish up in March.

Thanks for watching/reading! I'm gonna take a nap!

KC

I've put a little palette together for my game!

I can't start making assets until I have a palette in place so that's usually my first art task when I start working on a game.

A lot of gamedevs recommend putting art off until you've done some game testing with some generic blocks, and I think that is probably good advice! For me, I like to kind of get a little bit of everything in order before I start working on the game in earnest.

As you'll see in the video, I use Colormind to help me generate palettes. I find it to be a useful tool to make palettes that look more or less right but you kind of have to know how to work around its quirks. I think the main takeaway is that if you feed Colormind an image, it will give you a kind of crappy color palette but if you feed it a crappy color palette, it will give you a less crappy color palette.

Next up, I'll either start doing some programming or making some pixel art, depending how I feel.

Thanks for watching/reading! I'm going to bed!

KC

Progress continues on my jam entry!

I made a tutorial/explainer video on how I do game physics:

This is kind of a partner to a blog post I made last year on how I do physics for my games, which I have made public if you're interested!

(The source code is also available if you want to become a patron.)

Since then I've been kind of developing this skateboard precision platformer idea, trying to get the controls feeling right.

I'm gonna get back to work so I have something to show at the end of the month!

Thanks for reading!

KC