itch.io

Also, here’s a little amateur 1-bit pixel doodle of a potential player character concept:

I’m certainly not going to try to animate that for this game/jam… Just learning how to draw in tiny squares while getting ideas out of my head!

Updates!

I’ve refactored the movement a bunch and added floor sliding, crouching and crawling, and wall-jumping! (everybody loves a good wall jump ;) )

Wall-jump and slide:

Crouch and crawl:

…Feels nice!

Game Endeavor’s platformer tutorials helped me a lot, and I’ve already learned a bunch from adding these few movement extras. Especially about using Finite State Machines. I can see why these or similar patterns can become pretty critical in game design!

I’ve also started to entertain a new idea for the challenge/enemy… I’ll post updates once I flesh it out more and get some headway on it!

I'm a little late on the devlog, but here goes!

Vault -- A working name for now, playing on the idea of, y'know, a locked space, but also vaulting -- as in jumping -- over objects (so clever, no?), as my aim is to make an arcade parkour-style platformer in which the goal is to keep moving and jumping around in order to score and survive.

Just before this jam started, I started getting wayyy too addicted to playing Swarmlake. I loved it for how it could get me so absorbed in it, and encourage a state of real flow, despite being so minimalistic. I decided a good bet for the jam was to try something similarly tight in scope, so I could focus my efforts and learning on a few specific mechanics and elements.

I want to stick to using the theme, as I like the challenge and creativity under constraints, but I didn't want to  think about it too literally -- both because I like to make myself feel oh so clever, but also because I had a hard time thinking of a way in which actual locks of any sort in the game wouldn't impact the goal of encouraging constant movement, since locks generally imply some sort of delay in order to do whatever's needed to open them.

So two core ideas that popped up stuck with me. Either:

• The player has to keep moving in order to prevent some sort of target from "locking on" to them, or
• The level is made up entirely of interlocking pieces/tiles/blocks, which slide around in order to close up any traversable gaps in the area behind the player as they run, and threaten to crush them if they're not fast or careful enough

...I still haven't 100% settled on either of these yet. I started working with a leaning towards the latter, but as I started poking around, reading docs, watching tutorials, etc, I realized that the type of movement I'm looking for from these blocks, at the number of them I'd need to coordinate to make a whole level, might prove pretty difficult in the timeframe for this jam.

That said, I'm a bit tepid on the first idea by comparison, as I can't think of a way to make the target, or target-locking enemies, interesting and engaging enough to keep the desire to continue playing up... 

Either way, to keep things moving, I've decided to break the main parts of development up into some basic chunks so that at the very least I can have something interesting and "working" by the end of it, even if I only end up finishing the first chunk:

1) Fluid Player movement

• Get basic player movement down -- should be able to run around and jump on platforms, etc etc, and have it feel good/responsive.
• Finesse movement and add some more "parkour" elements if possible, such as wall jumps, dashes, maybe some vaulting, perhaps? And so on.

2) Level

• Build out a basic platformer level with obstacles and features that encourage the kinds of movement mentioned above
• Add any moving elements and other interesting features if possible

3) Enemies/threats

...This is where things are still kinda hazy at the moment... My course of action right now is to stick with a simple target that slowly searches around and gravitates towards the player, and if it manages to lock onto you:

Hopefully with this alone the game could still be fun enough to keep the player hopping around for a while! From there, I'll see how this could unfold into something more interesting. And if I learn enough working on moving level elements to feel comfortable veering back into the "interlocking" idea , and still have enough time to do so -- leaving enough to make a main menu, high scores and other overhead stuff like that -- Maybe I'll start running back in that direction (nyuk nuk).

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Progress so far:

I decided to go with Godot, as even though I'm a developer by profession, I didn't want to spend too much time learning new frameworks from the ground up and coding things from scratch and so on. And there also seemed to be a good amount of examples and tutorials out there for it. And it's free and open source (yay!).

So far I've only got a test level and some basic player movement down, so I've got some work ahead of me yet! But the player movement does feel good, so that's something! Here's what it looks like at the moment:

I decided to go super-minimal for now with assets, so I don't get hyperfocused on those at the expense of work on the gameplay. I drew some super-simple tiles (using Asesprite and Tilesetter Lite), and generated a spritesheet using pixeldudesmaker by 0x72. Ideally I'll have time to muck about with making my own pixel art for it later, but I wanna make sure the game feels good to play first!

I'm going to take a bit of time now to break down my tasks for the rest of the jam (probably using codecks. It's neat!), then get back to work!

A good luck to myself and everyone else in this jam! Hope everyone is learning and keeping it fuuuuuuuun!