I know it's short, but that's part of what makes it interesting to me. I've only done a few jams and the last one other kept devlogs here in the community section. Not sure how common that is, but enjoyed watching others build like at in-person hackathons.

Eexicted to kick off!

I'm building Scaredy Cat, a 3D puzzle platformer where you play as a cat trying to get out of a house that's coming apart. You have no attacks and for the prereq: the only thing that breaks anything is how fast you're going. And as cat owners know, the thing that makes you fastest is being scared. So up your fear by interacting with super scary objects to be able to hit the door hard enough and escape to the next level.

Thanks Neonfire for the discord tip, I'll be posting the rest there. 26 hours to go!

No time for fancy assets, so Biscuit is built from primitives with basic procedural animation for legs and tail. Also loves calming down by sitting on your laptop mid game.

Mechanics are straightforward, which is great for such a short jam, just double jump, run, pick-up items to make you afraid and falling panels. So those didn’t take long to implement. Since the puzzle aspect is basically route-planning, you have to find the various ways to chain your fear pickups to get enough speed. So the hard part is balancing the levels so they are both solvable and scaling in difficulty.

Like this level in the screenshot took me over an hour to figure out a way that layout the vacuum and other stuff so it looked/felt good but for the longest time was just unsolvable.

I’ve been trying to use Farclip, so far it’s been a help. But balancing this type of thing is something I don’t feel like I have a good concept of how to approach. Any one have recommendations of methods they use or even books to read? So close but feeling so far off with only a few hours left.

Cross-posting with Discord since I'm a Discord n00b.

Biscuit looks horrid in pink...

This is the dreaded build issue where everything looks good in editor. My own fault, really wish I would have tested my build settings in the first few hours instead of waiting.... nice to have a panic at the end like this.

Cover image and page written. QA passed (and it is beatable!). Wrapped up and submitted, just in time.

I'm new to game jams, and looking at other submissions, I'm really impressed with how many people produced something that looks cool in such a short time. Looking forward to playing them, and would love to hear any feedback on Scaredy Cat!

https://pixeldr.itch.io/scaredy-cat