Devlog 5

THOUGHT I'D SOMETHING MORE TO SAY

Well, it's been hot minute since the last devlog. Eleven days ago! I was just a young kid with a crazy dream.

For anyone reading these devlogs it must look like I abandoned the project altogether. And I kinda did! At least, I abandoned the idea of getting anything done for the jam. I had other stuff on last weekend so those two days were out, and when I returned on Monday I didn't like the idea of crunching something out for the deadline.

Instead I decided to keep up my jam schedule but work on other stuff. I did some design work for other things, including a thing for next week's 7DFPS (if all goes well) and another game I want to make after that.

I also did some voice acting for Hugton's soundtrack - which I guess is technically working on Hugton, except it's for the finished game and not the jam build I was supposed to be working on. Which means I've somehow found a way to slack off by doing extra work and I'm not sure how I feel about that.

I LOVE THE SOUND OF DEADLINES WHOOSHING BY

So in the end I didn't finish Hugton Loves You! for the Finish Your Game Jam. But I did manage to get a bare-bones preview build of the game up - playable through the first day, just as I'd planned - a couple of days after the deadline. It's extremely unfinished but it's something. My plan now is to work on Hugton Loves You! any day I have the time, and slowly finish it over the coming weeks (months? (years? who knows?)).

(Also, I just now realized if I ever make a Hugton sequel I could call it Hugton Loves 2 and now I really want to do a Hugton sequel)

DEAD YET STILL ALIVE

One of the other things I worked on in the last days of the Jam was an updated version of Dead On Time, the game I made for last year's 7DFPS (and Procjam). It's a short sleuth 'em up where you need to figure out which person arrived first at a party, then shoot them. I spent an evening replacing all the store-bought 3D models in the game with ones I created myself, which I've been meaning to do for AGES.

The updated build has the new models, as well as a feature I added last month which shows your notes on the win/lose reveal screen. This is something else I've wanted in for a long time - you can compare your notes with the actual guest arrival order and see how close your sleuthing/guesswork was.

UNFINISHED SYMPATHY

This will be the last devlog for the Jam (though I'll probably post more work-in-progress stuff as work on Hugton continues). Thanks for reading if you have! This is the first time I've ever done development 'in public' like this and I found it a little nerve-wracking, especially when it didn't go quite as planned.

Even so, I'm happy with the work I got done over the last couple of weeks. Before the jam started, Hugton Loves You was a lousy half-baked idea in my head that I'd been trying to nail down for months. Now it's a finished design which is already half-implemented, and with most of the hump work done. I ended up getting a build done for the showcase stream, too. As well as that, I got a bunch of work done on some other things and pushed out that Dead On Time update. Without the Finish Your Game Jam giving me a kick up the butt, I'd probably still be procrastinating all this stuff.

I do have takeaways and thoughts on 'what went wrong' but they're long enough to be their own blog post and this one's pretty long already (tl;dr: it was planning/management that let the side down - it always is) so I'll leave it here. I hope all the other jammers had fun and made cool things - see you at the showcase stream!

And remember - HUGTON LOVES YOU.