It's the all-important anti-cheese mechanic! Thank you :)
A member registered Jul 09, 2020 · View creator page →
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Just get through your day, and maybe you'll be rewarded with a duck
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Over the last couple of days our todo list has been decimated. Enemies are working, weird lighting bugs are sorted out, and these days you only occasionally get teleported into a wall. So now we have time to add some "nice-to-haves", including my dream of learning how to make an end game cutscene. It's a few seconds long and I love it more than it has any right to be loved.
Some of our friends are currently playtesting so no doubt we'll get plenty of bug reports to fix tomorrow. The jam finishes ludicrously early Sunday morning in our timezone so we'll try to get it all done and dusted and uploaded as early as possible tomorrow!
As expected we got absolutely tons done over this last weekend! Sadly not to the point where we could take part in playtesting weekend, but we're feeling good about progress.
First we'd identified a pretty serious bug with our player collider setup, so we spent a lot of time on Saturday making sure that was squashed. No pretty pictures to show for it, but it was satisfying. Then we went our separate ways task-wise.
While he focused on getting stuck into the enemy AI code, I worked on feedback for the player as they turn off the lamps. First, the global light goes down bit by bit as each lamp is turned off.
Until eventually the room is completely dark, and an unnnecessarily dramatic sequence begins where various things happen including the player's torch turning on (torch not yet actually included in the sprite, but shhh.)
Then it was time to start mocking up some proper graphics for the start / end screens, and on a whim (because we're here to learn new things, right?) I also added a localization package and set up an Esperanto option. We've been learning Esperanto for a while so since this entire project is an in-joke it seemed fitting.
Once that was done I ran a build just to make sure everything was working...and everything broke. Cue an hour and a half of changing random things and rebuilding to see what would happen (if anyone has any advice on debugging a build version that would be great).
A friend of ours offered to compose real music for the game, so thankfully we're no longer making do with random beeps as a soundtrack. It sounds really great!
For the rest of this week we'll be working on building out multiple levels, getting friends to playtest, and I still need to redo most of the art assets. Should have plenty of time, in theory at least!
We haven't done nearly as much as a lot of people in this jam, but given our beginner status and our competing responsibilities I'm honestly really proud of us. It's not over yet, but at least so far I can say we've had zero serious arguments so that's a win :D
Not a huge amount of progress this week, it'll mostly happen at the weekend because work and stuff. But we have discussed our overall vision for the game and come to agreement on some fun mechanics, and in the meantime the graphics are in the middle of what probably won't be their last update (enemies are still placeholder, obviously).
We've also decided to take the level time limit out, since it doesn't really fit with where we're taking the game. It was fun to find out how to implement it, though!
Good Luck With The Lamps! is a simple (puzzle?) platformer based on a completely nonsensical couple's in-joke between the two of us.
Once upon a time on our way to bed one night, one of us wished the other good luck with [turning] the lamps [off]. Somehow that became a nightly ritual, a wrestling match to find out who would be left behind to have said luck with the lamps, a custom designed coffee mug, and a Google Home trained to respond to it as a command.
So we didn't even really have to think about what we'd call our first joint game dev venture, the only question was what the gameplay should be. I was too busy giggling at the lamps to really care, and he loves retro platformers, so here we are!
Day 1: We set up a fairly standard 2d character controller and movement, found some placeholder assets to test out some level configurations, and set about figuring out how to make a lamp object with a light that could be toggled on/off on collision. At this stage everything was basically a square of one colour or another, and we spent a ridiculous amount of time trying to code around the fundamental problem of putting two colliders on our player object. By the end of the day we could toggle the lamps, track how many were turned on at any one time, and spawn an exit to the next level when all were toggled off.
(Sorry for the obnoxious end screen in this gif, that was all his idea)
Day 2: We made some graphics! Still placeholder, but at least they're ours. We wanted to get the thing playable from start to finish asap so set up some extremely rough menu and game over screens, and figured out how to string multiple levels together. Today's big task was really figuring out how Unity handles scale of graphics, and how to get the pixel look we wanted, but we got there in the end.
Also I learned to do super basic pixel animations, which was fun!
Day 3: We finally moved the two colliders off our Player object and into child objects, and we're kicking ourselves for not doing it sooner. I started making some terrible pixel art for our character to replace the placeholder fox from the asset store.
Introducing Mr. James Bearington, who just wants to turn off his lamps and go to bed. He's only slightly creepy looking.
We're currently experimenting with time limits and basic patrolling enemies, although we'll see what actually makes it into the final product.
Development will slow down a lot now since we're back at work after the weekend, but progress was good! I'm reasonably confident we can put a decent level of polish into this, and most importantly we're having a ton of fun with our stupid little game.