Posted May 11, 2021 by bwdevel
#gamejam #gamedev #level-up circle jam #pico-8 #devlog
Day three was much of the same; putting in about 6 hours into development. Today I worked on primarily a state machine for handling game states, which you can see a sample of here:
The various menu screens are just placeholders for now (hopefully); I plan to spend a good portion of one day in the jam juicing up all of the menus, but that will definitely be something that is dropped out of the plan if I get crushed for time.
Planned tasks
Unplanned tasks
The "game over" screen will have stats for the player. In general, here are all of the menu screens (most in mock-up phase)
Title screen
How to play screen
Credits screen
Game over screen
I love working within the constraints of Pico-8. Some people see working with constraints adds unneeded difficulty to a project, but for me I find that it keeps me much more focused. That being said, I'm hoping to not run into the token limit in Pico-8 on this project. As much as I like doing optimization stuff, I really want to get to the point that I have plenty of room to just spend the last few days of the jam doing en mas content creation. As it stands now, I'm utilizing around 45% of the memory tokens. I'm not nervous... yet.
Tomorrow I want to continue working on game mechanics outside of play to further get the state system working relibably and comprehensively. I want to really clean those systems up and make them solid so that I can spend the 2nd half of the jam focusing on game content and playable.
Tomorrow's list
I've been a hobbist music lover and musician most of my life, and my tastes in music are fairly diverse ranging from classical to folk to metal. But for development, I really need to have instrumental music and needs to be fairly chill. When I put such music on, I lose track of hours as I get 'into the zone'. For me there is a stand-out musician that works for me, General Fuzz: