Day 7 & 9
SOOO! I got so busy working on the game that I lost track of this devlog. Haha. I'll go ahead and fill in as much as I can remember. The good news is that this story has a very happy ending! :)
After planning the UI on graph paper, the next step for me was utilizing HTML, CSS, and a little Jquery to get the UI nice and sexy. I went with my third thumbnail, and immediately painted the backdrop.
From there I worked some CSS magic and arrived at the current UI build.
I chose rounded corners with heavy use of glow for the UI elements to contrast the dark background. I also wanted to give it that "Steven King" kind of feeling, as if the players is looking at some supernatural occurrence taking place deep in the woods. I chose my typeface carefully based on these themes as well. It's a free Google font. ;)
The next difficult part was getting the scrolling text to work. That gave me a lot of issues, as I had to use a free jquery plugin and make it work within my own code structure.
What I had to do here: I basically set up my code as a giant loop that reads from string based text objects. The loop adds each character to one variable. When finished, that variable gets pushed to the jquery plugin, and the plugin types it to the screen with the pretty typewriter animation. I had to modify my code quite a bit, and even modify the plugin slightly to get everything to work properly. There are some bugs, but it works well enough.
Day 9 - 13
These next few days I spent jamming out some art. Looking back at the finished product, I don't think I've ever worked more fast and efficiently than I did during these 4 days. The insane part to all of this was that I did this all while working within the confines of the tiny bit of free space my 40 hour/week job allows me. All I can really say here, is that I set daily goals, and worked like hell to meet them without fail. At times I had to cut back on the number of sprites and backgrounds, and I had to get creative and realistic with what time allowed for. This is an area I'm definitely going to expand on and add more art to later!
(Placeholder for art assets, will update later! If you're interested, check out the finished game.)
Day 14
The final day I spent pretty much the entire day loading all of the code and story segments into my game. Honestly, I held my breath a little for this stage and really rode it like a cowboy. If anything failed here, I wouldn't have had the time to fix or diagnose anything. I finished about 5 hours early, and spent the remainder of that time loading in the music and play-testing. I tested every single route, and was very pleased to see it all working as intended. The music was composed by Jacob Diaz, and was originally intended for a different project that's long since been abandoned, but perfectly fit into this one. It was awesome to see Jacobs awesome music finally get a good home.
And that's it! My First Game Jam went splendidly. I set deadlines, and met them with striking accuracy. I got sick, and had some small issues along the way, but was pleasantly surprised to find out how doable it is to create a game all by myself. :) You better bet, this won't be my last project. I feel a nice release knowing that I have the skills to pretty much do what I want without having to rely too heavily on others.