Itsybitsy
Day 1:
It was an otherwise busy day today, but I've had plenty of time to think on and talk about my idea with others and it's got enough shape I think. I've been playing with the art, which is generally where I start these days. And I'm happy with the look and style, and even managed to squeeze a full UI into the 64x64 space.
The game will be a mix of world building and town building. The player is periodically given a tile to place down in the world, these must conform to neighbor tiles but can otherwise be placed in any order. Tiles will slowly produce resources for you, which you can collect in your inventory. You can use the resources to create buildings (by dragging them onto a tile), or upgrade existing buildings (by dragging them onto a building). The most basic type of building is a house, and it is the base for most other buildings. Houses home a worker who will walk along roads to other buildings and help boost their resource productivity. And produced resources can be placed on tiles and buildings to discover new buildings. The aim is to allow free growth and a lot of experimentation.
As for code, I still haven't started a project yet. I fixed up some older code and fixed an issue I had in my last jam game where the keyboard didn't work due to the game being run in an iFrame (finally discovered window.focus()).
Anyway, here's my tiles and mockups:
Day 2:
I haven't got much to show for day 2. My GF has her first car so I've been out with her so she doesn't panic so much, and today we went to the zoo and I finally saw the bears there! Enough excuses. I have been working on the engine, seeing as I'm working in JavaScript without any libraries I'm having to write everything myself. Most of it is derived from previous jam games, though I've changed a lot so it's all consistent. All the basics should be in there now; game update/render loop, sprite and tile systems, audio, input, etc, so I can start putting the game together tomorrow. The goal is to keep the actual game code as simple as possible, my last jam game had about 3500 lines of code and I spent way to long just scrolling and looking for stuff. Ever since I first used Love2D, I've loved it's system of just creating/overriding the update and render functions, and they're executed automatically behind the scene, so my engine follows this system as well. Yes, I named the engine TOAST for the lack of any logical name for it. :)
Day 3:
I was out for ages again today, but managed to get some decent progress done. I started actually implementing parts of the game, rather than all engine work like yesterday. I included all the existing tiles and UI graphics, which I have to define manually from the texture sheet, as I have no system for doing that easily yet. So you can select the tile from the UI and place it into the world, and then shortly after a new tile becomes available:
And this next image is just to show how much of the project has been writing the engine versus the game. Hence why it might seem slow off the mark compared to my previous jam games! :) But I don't think it's going to be a complex game so it shouldn't get much more extensive than this.
Day 4:
Out all day again, urg. So I've only managed to create a camera/view system in the engine and apply that to moving around in the game. I don't plan to go out for long tomorrow (today was a 6+ hour thing), so the mission tomorrow is to implement natural resource spawning and building creation! That should start to make it feel gamey.
Day 5:
Brought some Steam games on sale today... So that was half the day gone. But I did complete my mission for today, which was to add in buildings. This meant some new engine stuff, such as high-level handling of grids (2d arrays) & adding layers to my tile system. It's set up so that you can only place buildings on the "dead-end" road tiles, this means that you have to more carefully think ahead when placing your road systems and other world tiles. My goal tomorrow is to add natural item spawning, such as wood, stone, wheat and metal, that will give the game some self-sustainability.
Day 6:
Still mostly gaming! >.< But I got resource spawning in. Works well, the only issue is that picking up a resource in the world is not the same as picking it up from the inventory, you have to place it in the inventory first to place it in the world... So I need to make them the same. And make it work for things other than trees. Then it should be all good. The plan tomorrow is to make buildings upgradable, should be easy enough so will likely get a few things done tomorrow, I hope!
Day 7:
OK, so I failed my plan today! I did fix a few things but was otherwise getting distracted (had to go shopping, and we ended up with kids round (and there's a drumset in my GF's sister's room right above my head, fun. + general girly screeching)). I have written up a to-do list however, and plan to get through that, there's some front end stuff in there so that should make a nice change at least!
Day 8, 9, 10:
I forgot to log a couple days because I was having to get up early. But I've made a fair bit of progress. I've now got a working main menu, created a font and the systems for drawing it, new buildings and resources, improved system for upgrading buildings, some animation (I didn't build this into my sprite system from the start, so I'm kinda hacking it atm.) While there's not really an objective to the game it's starting to feel fun, I personally am a fan of peace games, where you can just build and grow and experiment with no end. Anyway, here's my progress in a picture:
