Hi, just started today, so I really only have 11 days to make this. This isn't my first jam or anything but I'd like to pursue this one since the timing seems up my alley.

Thinking of doing a survival topdown shooter with some sort of melee mechanic. My goal is to try and make my coding a little more organized and maybe do some really basic menu options near the start, things like window/fullscreen options. Stuff I normally don't put into gamejam games. Also I have an idea for a cool lighting effect that involves a pretty simple trick, we'll see if it makes it in.



Made some movement and some basic collisions. You play as a cat thing I guess. He's kind of wide. Enemies will likely come out of the holes, I might make waves or "levels" change where the holes are. That's all for tonight.

Day 2, added diagonal sprite movement, functionality for walking as well but need to animate though. I don't really like the sprites so far as they don't feel "on model" Another issue is that the last arrow key pressed determines the "remaining" sprite in the array. So you could be pressing down-right stop, and your character suddenly stops at either down or right depending on how its released.

10 days remain...

Walking animations done and "strafing" in which you can shoot and lock facing while slowly moving.

states have been programmed in but they don't do anything yet (other than pretend shooting)

9 days remain...

Got shooting, you squirt water because THEME (also dimmed the background to suit it). Only issue so far is shooting south looks a bit off due to the sprite's gun placement being off center. Either change the sprite to conform to the center or offset the shooting? Idk might just leave it the way it is since it looks ok on every other facing.

Since I have the weekend off I should make a lot more progress (obviously).

8 days remain.

Did nothing on Sunday, took a break from everything.

Today I had family matters to attend to but still managed to add in a little enemy



Chases you around basically. Suddenly my game is very buggy.



...Very buggy. They essentially move away from each other when they bump into each other but that makes them slower in groups. I kind of like the stuttery movement they make when they bounce into each other. Makes them a little more insecty. Also water mixed with soap does kill cockroaches, so killing bugs with a water gun is realistic. https://biology.stackexchange.com/questions/16911/why-do-cockroaches-burst-from-... My friend on discord was mentioning a cockroach problem so I decided to make them the enemy to spite her. Then again the game might be a stress reliever. Gonna add in some way to roast the cockroaches when they hit the fire. However you might not want to do that since each hit decreases the fire.

5 days remain...

Implemented me some waves. Meaning I can set up groups of enemies that spawn in specified areas and will only start another wave when the current wave is done being killed. I also fixed a weird facing glitch where the character wouldnt face where they're shooting depending on a set of keys you pressed. Really just need to hone on the core game loop as it's not really done atm. I'm basically settling on a survival game where you try not to shoot the fire or else you'll lose your vision.

Todo list:

Add ability to get damaged by enemies and some sort of health/death thing
Add more enemy types and variety. Scope out the entire survival system with maybe different room setups and entry points appearing one by one.
Allow fire to kill enemies (however the fire also gets damaged), and set enemies to invisible when the fire runs out of hp.

Maybe add some sort of scoring/currency system which could MAYBE lead into an upgrade system.
Maybe add a mini tutorial on what the goal of the game is.

Canceling the potential melee mechanic I had in mind before.



4 days remain...

Got lives / invincibility and death implemented and some kind of loop where you have to start over. Didn't make an update yesterday since it took me awhile. Now need to make waves or "phases" where the enemies are more predetermined (some elements randomized) where you have to out last the sets of enemies as opposed to a set time. I haven't logistically worked out a timer system so I'm just going to modify what I have as sort of the goal, think of it as a kill all enemies challenge.  Hopefully I get that done by tonight!

Tomorrow I will do an upgrade system that happens inbetween the phases.

Saturday I'll try to wrap things all up with anything I can think of, sound effects, enemy types, music, additional animations, options select.

General flow chart pretty much done, albeit everything is placeholder atm. Basically there are 4 levels or "phases" which contains waves of enemies that persist until you kill them all. Each phase might have different entrances/fire placements that make it harder and of course harder and harder waves. Inbetween each phase you can purchase upgrades. If you run out of lives and die you'll start back at phase 1 essentially. So it's going to be a short game with an end to it.

Didn't have time to actually variate the fire/entrance placements but I'll leave that til tomorrow as I work on the actual shop upgrade system.

I actually do have a story for this game in mind, no idea if I can implement an intro/proper story ending before the deadline.

2 days remain...

Entrances are randomized, phases have their own colors now, enemies can now suicide run into the fire, and enemies become "invisible" in the darkness. Fires are fixed and hand designed in though, I don't really know a good way to randomize them without sacrificing a lot of balance, but I think there's enough randomness to make it fun each time. Basically the farther you are into the game the less fires there are. Hopefully fun situations arise from not wanting enemies to run into the fire.

Now to do upgrades tonight...

Tomorrow I'll do a whack of things and be spending all day getting everything possible done. Really the main thing is just adding more enemies into the actual waves and enemy types.

+ 4

Got a shop menu going, doesn't actually do anything yet as I rather make the actual upgrades. Feel a bit behind, but still a good pace. Lots of things rhyming with -ash incidentally. Gonna sleep now.

Here be some sound design added, music and sfx and whatnot. I'm kind of worried about the sound design with regards to music vs sfx, if the music is too high you can't hear the sfx and if the sfx too high you can't hear the music. Right now the sfx is just default gain and music is like 0.4 or something. dB is just a headache to manage mannnnn. One key change I decided to do is add a wait timer after you've cleared a phase, basically it just goes silent and lets you walk around to collect loot. Spacing out the transitions and giving some dead time does give the game some pacing.

The test video also shows the general scope of the game a little better. A new enemy type has been added and enemy recolors have higher HP.  The waves don't really have enough enemies yet as I haven't designed them really, but it makes it easier and faster to test the game at this point.

todo:
-make enemy damage flash white
-add some different movement patterns or behaviors for enemies
-actually fill the waves with more enemies and try to design interesting situations out of them. Also might help to randomize them a tiny bit between waves.
-uhhhhhhh make an ending and intro?

10 hours left, feel like I have plenty of time but gonna ration it to really experiment with enemy behaviors and fine tune the design. I'm willing to give up the story for that I guess.

I did not make the music for this jam, music is actually by Ozzed a guy who does public domain chiptune music.

made some new enemy behaviors, spent a little too much time on shaders and stuff just to get the white flash to happen when you hit an enemy. right now I'm designing the actual waves, might add more enemy behaviors if theres any time left. Idk be really nice to have a tanky enemy with interesting behavior.

submitted  https://itch.io/jam/my-first-game-jam-summer-2018/rate/284926

check it out. REALLY rough build, I'm motivated enough to update it to some 1.1 build tomorrow to properly implement options and give an actual win screen reward lol. But yeah really good jam, felt like I learned a lot in terms of programming a game in a very lateral method where really the content only gets made in the last few hours or so (though I've encountered such a thing before, just wasn't on the programming side of things).  Testing the game I felt like I didn't even make it since the way the game is constructed is very self driven, unique situations arise from different enemy combinations so it almost doesnt matter what I input other than making sure not to spam the player too much. I'll do a write up about what I mean later.

Here's me testing the game one last time before compiling to build. Kind of an on the spot video to document my tired dev state.