Game Jam Dev log

Made this devlog as criteria for: https://itch.io/jam/banana-game-jam-3

# Day 1.

Wanted to take some doing some light job hunting and rekindle my love for making games in Godot. Recently I have tried to work in Unity, but I feel at home when working in Godot.

On to the game jam --

I found this game jam on itch, which seemed to coincide with a more relaxed week.

I got the theme and special object. And wrote down a bunch of ideas.
Most of them were based on kindness and giving things away, but I didn’t think it would make for good gameplay.
Some ideas included:

• There is a party and you need to give all your presents away
• Packaging bananas and delivering them to people
• Exploding kittens but instead it’s a present and the person who accepts the present loses.

I eventually got a little fed up of my ideas and went for a walk. Thinking to myself. If I can’t make a game directly on a theme.. Maybe I could just try to make a game I would find fun then tie the theme back in.

I eventually came to the idea of combining Peggle and Puzzle Quest together. I’ve also played Peglin before and I liked to play that as well.

I just spent most of the time on the first day just thinking about how I could make it and what I should do.

# Day 2.

Started to work on the idea, got the basic ball bouncing and destroying the pegs. Then quickly came the resource gathering.

I was kind of stuck to be honest on how I wanted to combine these two elements together.

In games because I’ve played tons of rogue-likes that do scaling. I have done scaling before but I feel like scaling sometimes can be a bit rough. as I feel like sometimes it’s just numbers moving around, sometimes your number is bigger then your enemies number in a tug of war. And it takes quite a bit of time to balance. So I went for more of a flat arcade like design.
I was thinking tons about that today.

Ultimately I just wrote just a small step to get into it as I felt overwhelmed in the possibilities of what I could create.
Alot of the time I think my biggest opponent in making games is myself and I often get caught up in “this will be too much work”, and “what about this”, then I freeze up and do something smaller. I notice after I get past the initial hump, it’s never that bad, but it seems something I need to keep on relearning.. haha.

The task was:

• Shoot ball from cannon and have it bounce.

# Day 3

Felt a bit sleepy in the morning. I tend to do well when I have a consistent schedule but somedays I just can’t help it.
I was more productive later in the day.

Today was more of a work heavy day.

• Pegs broken with ball will give resources
• Resources can be used to use special moves.
• Enemy and player can die if they take enough damage.

Essentially had a decent size of the loop completed.
Player can use moves,
Then Enemy,
Then player goes into a resource collecting phase.

# Day 4 
Added ability for a new enemy to spawn when dying.
Took some inspiration from Slay the Spire and added enemy telegraphing after the enemy finishes their move so the player can have an idea of what they’ll do so the player can strategize around it.

Around this day I felt increasingly happy about the game I am making. It feels like I have something special at least to me. For me I really like Peggle and I really like Puzzle quest and I’ve sunk a decent amount of hours in both on Xbox / PC

I started to take parts of games I like today and just mashed things together making the following functionalities

1. Player if player gets a string of points they awarded bonus balls, bonus resources
2. Coin flip if the player completely whiffs the ball. This includes the special banana object.
3. If player completes all the orange balls, a new peg board is made -- as I felt the player completing a peg board completely is kinda tedious.

# Day 5

1. Added a bouncing basket on the bottom so the ball can stay in play longer. I was thinking of doing the hoop in peggle, but it felt to similar and I wanted to make it feel more distinct.
2. Updated the pegs to dynamically change resources instead of being static for the pegboard. -- I felt like if I wanted to make different characters with different resource requirements, some peg boards might not have enough of the resources they need, making them kind of useless.

Today I was thinking more on how to implement the kindness theme. I was putting it off for a while and trying to figure out where to stick it. I got a bit lost in the sauce.

I was thinking of quite a few ways of “kindness” but it still felt kind of rough to me or out of scope of what I could do. or just not fun in terms of gameplay.

The ideas I had:

• Player needs to go through a dungeon and fight enemies, some enemies you can spare them, and it has a little monologue, then the player has them join their roster.
  --> Issue I had with this, is player might have a hard time to know which enemies to spare that would give them a new character and what if they previously spared them before? It opened a can of worms of single-use content which I don’t particularly like for arcade-like games
• What if you work for a non profit organization and you are clearing out the monsters to help villagers?
  --> I felt this feels a bit imperialist, and kinda weird, so I didn’t think it’d be kind at all. (you wipe out other living creatures, for your living creatures)
• Player can unlock characters by collecting enough keys or currency to buy someones freedom.
  --> Again I though this was a bit weird, I felt it implied some wierd sick politics in my game which I didn’t want.

# Day 6

I thought more about the kindness mechanic I thought of yesterday and just went ahead and implemented it.

Eventually I came up with the idea of you can spare monsters or you can kill them after you have a fight.
I don’t know if it was strong enough in terms of the game jam theme, but I think it did it’s job.
The idea is that sparing them might not give you a reward, but it can be better. And killing them will always give a reward, but it’s crappy. So in a gamified sense -- I think it would incentivize kindness and sparing the monsters life instead of extinguishing it.

Then the next step was just thinking about where to go from here, and I sensed I needed to make more enemies to fight.
So I just went ahead and just started making more enemies.

With each enemy / character I tried to tie some small variance in gameplay

• Rat can poison character, losing their turn
• Lich can sap nature energy away from player

Later in the day I was thinking to myself it really needs some music and sound so I went ahead and implemented it.

I found some great music on Open Game Art
https://opengameart.org/content/4-chiptunes-adventure

I tend to just play my game and have the music run in the background and play it through a few times and imagining how it’d feel when hooked up.

Later - Later in the day. I was thinking of character unlocks and playing more on the kindness theme but I didn’t end up getting much out of it.

I was thinking of maybe if you spare alot, you get an angel character, kill alot and you get a devil character. But I just didn’t feel right about it.

# Day 7
Today I worked on making a title screen, character select, and the credits.
Ended up making a new character. Now there is two.
Adventurer - is kinda like the everyman default character
Thief - which is supposed to move nimbly and attack extra.

After I made the character select,
I keep having ideas to make a sith like character as I feel like that would be cool. Maybe having to balance HP and dealing damage like a Black Deck in magic.

Hit tagline might be something like “deals in absolutes”which would be a fun nod.

Ended up creating a new character by the end of day:

• Ice mage - makes icy orbs that explodes with shards of ice - considered a high difficulty character with low HP

Spent quite a bit of time getting lost in playing the game and making small tweaks here and there.

I found a bug where sometimes the player is unable to do anything and it’s stuck on the enemies turn.

# Day 8
Created the following characters:

• Demolistionist - every 2 MULT pegs it will cause an explosion. and can deal high amount of damage, but needs to store RANDOM orbs.
• Mechanic - a whacky character that can make the basket bigger and faster and shoot a bunch of balls.

I think I fixed the bug from yesterday. It took a while to figure out. Something to do with how I change between game modes.

Today I got lost in just playing the game really and trying to figure out a good name. I am still not happy with it, but it might be“Orb Smashers”

I had some other ideas but I felt like I didn’t want an IP problem. Or rather I have no idea if a game jam game could cause an IP problem.. haha.

If I had the choice it’d have Peggle in the name.

Right now I feel very happy with this game how it turned out.
I think I could make the following if I had more time:

• more character you can play as,
• maybe unlockable characters. like the sith character I mentioned prior.
• Better UX / Feedback for lots of things.
  -“courses” which are sets of enemies that you fight and a high score for each.

Tommorow I might just focus on UX / Polish, setup the page on itch and then submit it. As I got other tasks to do this week.
But we will see. I really think adding the sith character could be neat.

# Day 9

Today was mainly focused on putting out a build for web and making sure it worked cleanly.

I ended up having some HTML5 issues or export UI issues in general. It took a bit to fix.

I even got it running on mobile on the iPad.

Not sure what's going on for HTML5, but when the music transitions, it flares up. However it does not occur on windows builds!

Submitted the build. I think it's in a good enough state for the game jam. I am considering making some updates on this in my spare time.

Here is the final version of my game!