The concept is growing and trimming a bonsai. At time of this post, I am working on developing the growth algorithm and trimming feature. Things I’ve decided to wait till later, and even possibly after the jam ends, include watering and feeding your tree, but I’d like to have many options for players to trim their bonsai to their liking.

I typically like to get player feedback during development, but to keep some of the game a secret I will be posting screenshots. Lmk what you think!

Have a great jam everyone!

Initially working title was “Highlander”, but then I got inspiration from one old movie from the 80s, and it influenced the setting.

I created a postmortem for my game Need Not You which you can check out here:

Need Not You: A Postmortem

So, Auburn is (or, will be) a platform adventure game where you play as a fox who is all alone in the world, unable to understand those around her. It’s a tale of friendship, of exploration, and of discovering that often our inner strength is far more powerful that we ever realised it could be.

I started off day one by drawing out some of the world that the game will take place in, and putting together a tile-map that can be used to build out the world over the next couple of weeks.

Original: https://little-martian.itch.io/auburn/devlog/411561/day-1-artwork

For the last 4 years, myself and Omar have been participating in the LOWREZJAM making "bee" themed games featuring our hero: Bruce Bee!  Originally it was just a visual theme for a random platformer game, but after getting some comments like "bees are a bad choice for a platformer", "the hero should be able to fly", for a laugh we opted to lean into the flightless bee thing and the next year came back with an endless runner. Since our first LOWREZJAM in 2018 we've been making tiny bee themed games and this year will be no exception! 

I've always wanted to make a Missile Command type game and I love the challenge of making something tiny so what better time time to try? I'm a better artist than I am a programmer so coming up with a visual concept easy but I certainly didn't expect to run into so many issues on the code end.

First it was an issue of bullets destroying the wrong targets so you can see in this screenshot here that I had to start matching IDs to make sure bullets could only destroy their dedicated "X". Then I was having problems with the different sprites and instances not tracking how I was intending and turns out I was creating overlapping objects. Then one of the menus wouldn't go away because I was triggering it in 2 places. All in all it's been a lot of little issues in the spaghetti that is the code for this game BUT I'm happy to say after almost a week, the basic game is in place. 

• You can shoot from all 3 hives (turrets) - each with 5 rounds
• Bullets go to designated "X"
• Hives and flowers (towns) are destroyed upon enemy impact
• Enemies spawn in waves
• Pause menu between each wave to award bonus points and refill on honey (bullets)
• Some Gameplay art is in place

There's still a lot of polish to be done and more features we'd love to add but I'm definitely happy with where we're sitting at the moment! 

I'm always so bad for keeping up with devlogs but let's see if I can remember to do a couple before the jam is over! 

• Built on top of Raylib
• Indexed palette-based pixel art renderer (lines, rectangles, circles, affine sprites - rotation, scaling, shearing)
  
• Generic dynamic array
• A-star pathfinder
•  .json parser.
• Some basic utility

For now I'm playing around with the resolution in Aseprite to get a feel for our beloved tiny 64 square. Didn't get to work with such a small amount of screen space, yet. My tools of choice:

• VS Code - Language: C
• Aseprite (Art)
• Bfxr (Sound)
• Bosca Ceoil (Music)

So, yeah, two more days to go until we're off to the races! 

You can also play this "playable version"  here : https://darenn.itch.io/lueur

Feel free to let me know your thoughts in the comments. Did you find new ideas thanks to the 64x64 resolution contraint ?

Also don't forget to follow me to be notified each time I post a devlog !

See you !

The day before the jam started, I did some brainstoring in preparation; I thought I had a pretty good idea of what I wanted to make but then I saw the themes and got a much better idea. It's a platformer (I adore platformers), with hopefully a little aspect of metroidvania mixed in. Plants as Tools produced some interesting movement upgrades, and works well with Kill it with Fire to make a world scorched by fire (which is where the name comes from) with you as a plant trying to find a way out of the flames. 

The first thing I did was get the player movement sorted out. I originally wanted 8x8 sprites but halfway through tweaking the platforming code I realized 8x8 rooms weren't going to cut it (I wasn't going to have any camera movement aside from room transitions) so I redrew the player to 4x4, changed the movement code, and finally made a little 4x4 tileset to go with it. I've never working with such small sprites before, but making the tilesets is really fun and goes fast. Once the movement was done, I started on fire-spikes and checkpoints. I ran into a lot of problems with collision but it was mostly because I'm a little rusty with godot/also don't know precisely how some things work. Eventually I got it figured out, along with a (I think) satisfying little death/spawn animation for the player and another tileset.

I also planned out the rest of the stuff that I wanted to add, and started working on a couple more hazards that I'm keeping secret. I tried to keep the scope really small since I've been stuck in a cycle of starting and cancelling projects that are way too big, but there's a chance I won't be able to finish in time because there's also music, sfx and backgrounds to deal with. There's still a lot of time left though, so I'm not worrying yet. Progress so far:

Let me know what you think of the fire; I might have to redraw it.

Got a Playable Character, basic level layout and pointy arrows to show the possible directions the player can go :)

(Also epic screen fade haha)

I finally starting programming the game after all this time playing around with design ideas. 

Read the full devlog here.

Feel free to let me know your thoughts in the comments. How did you architecture your code ?

Also don't forget to follow me to be notified each time I post a devlog !

See you !

In this game the objective is to survive as long as possible with your little village, I wanted to do something similar to an RTS or Tower defense game, but with the minimal knowledge I had in game dev I had lots of things to learn from scratch

Basically, you buy peasants that plant food and you need to wait for their harvest to gain some coin, and then buy warriors to survive while you are being attacked by hordes of orcs,a basic RTS but on a 64x64 resolution, the game can be played here: https://august-sant.itch.io/the-other-world-rts., the game has some problems with optmization and pathfinding sometimes, i may resolve that in the future but with the knowledge i have now it would probably be better to redo a lot of basic mechanics.

This was my first game jam ever and my first game on Godot, I had to learn a lot of stuff to do this game pathfinder, tile system, how interfaces and buttons work, the scripting language of Godot, and resolve a lot of bugs.. lol, but that was overall a pretty cool experience and I now know much more than I started with, thanks for reading!.

 I got the idea to directly write down those design on 64x64 pixel art documents, "design cards".

Read the complete devlog on my game page.

Feel free to let me know your thoughts in the comments. How much time did you pass on the design before starting programming ? Did you write design documents ? Maybe you prefer starting from an idea and then iterate, how did it work out so far ? Could you have avoided errors by taking more time designing before ?

Also don't forget to follow me to be notified each time I post a devlog !

See you !

The default is 64x64, with no textures, but the game can optionally go up to 512x512, with textures. I plan on having 4 main areas. 3 areas with boss battles, to obtain gems that have special powers, and a final 4th area where you have to use each of your 3 powers to solve a puzzle/defeat a boss.

I did not have a lot of time to work on the game since the start of the jam. But let's see my progress anyway !

Read the devlog here.

Feel free to let me know your thought in the comments. How did you designed your game ? Have you made much progress yet ? Was it hard to get back into programming with your engine ? Also don't forget to follow me to ne notified each time I post a devlog !

See you !

Orange meter is sun damage, green is stamina, and obviously the artwork is temporary lol. I have attacks in, but they're still pretty broken, and the robot just kind of walks toward you and waits to get hit right now. The plan is a three hit combo, low attack, jump attack, and a shoulder charge, plus a handful of enemies that require different approaches. In a great example of prioritizing, I've already made the end cutscene, which I won't share because it's a bit of a spoiler, if that's not too self-indulgent. 

Planning to work on enemy mechanics and fixing attacks today, and maybe adding some resource gathering to upgrade resistances. I have really big ideas for music, so I hope I can get the gameplay solid pretty early to give me time to have fun with that. Looking forward to seeing everyone else's projects!

This project is a just for fun development experiment intended for submission to the LOWREZJAM 2022. I will be uploading and sharing the progress of my game as I go.

For those unfamiliar, FPV (First Person View) drones, These drones are flown with a VR like headset and allow for full user control unlike your standard camera drone. The lack of computer assistance can make these drones difficult to fly at first, but they are significantly more capable. Commonly these are the drones used in racing events.

The goal for this project is to create an accurate FPV simulator within the confines of a 64x64 pixel resolution. I will try to add as many features and modes as possible within the duration of the game jam.

I am using unity for this project along with some recycled assets from an older project, the 3D models were originally created by Synity studios. Surprisingly, one of the more difficult aspects of this project so far has been getting things to actually render at 64x64. I am using extremely low poly models to help the edges stand out a bit more, and to help with the style.

As of the first upload, I have finished the basic flight mechanisms and control scheme. I have also begun a simple open world environment to fly around in.

Feel free to take a look and let me know what you think.

https://darenn.itch.io/placeholder-lowrezjam-2022/devlog/410945/preparing-the-ja...