Posted March 08, 2026 by Dragon-Slayer Games
Just released the Jam version of this project.
I am still pleased with what I accomplished in the timeframe, and with the idea, though not sure how it panned out in the end, as I found it kept adapting to be playable.
Not as complete as I would like, and need balancing in the rounds. As you can see I did the artwork myself except the title page, so its pretty janky!
Round based play was added at the last minute, it was initially a how long can you last idea, but my son suggested round based, and I liked that as it was not feeling right before.
Some biggish bugs still existed in this released, namely:
A challenging part was the skaters movement. I envisioned initially a sort of wavey/curvy motion, but this was hard to make nice, and making them circle the lake didnt add the randomness needed for the play style.
In the end it as a simple , pick point, travel to point movement, but a mis-understanding of the angle_to function led this to take far longer than it should!
The code is a little messy, in particular the NPC, as the ice fisher was initially envisioned to be a simple walk on and off item but in play tests it become obvious it would be better to be able to catch and remove him, so he became very much like a skater.
But I did not do skater common code as a base class, so although fisherman does have a NPC base class, Skater never used it as it was too close to deadline to start messing around. Definitely should have made a NPC base class with potentially common items just in case.
Overall it was fun, and I will try to release a video recap too, never done a dev log before, and would like to practice.
Will definitely jam again, but maybe not such short time-span, if I was young and single sure, but its a bit much between family, work and farm commitments!