(trypophobia warning, maybe?)

hello i'm legs, a latecomer

i'm making a simple puzzle bobble/bejeweled sort of game about wasps. i have no experience with game dev whatsoever. (i do have a story in mind, and maybe eventually i'll expand it into something more complete? i'm not concerned with that right now, though!)

(here is the lowest effort mockup imaginable)

after a week and a half of being completely lost in construct 2, i finally moved over to gamemaker and am finding it a lot more flexible. though mostly i've just been reading tutorials so far... i'm a pretty slow worker so i don't have high expectations for actually completing anything, but my goal right now is only to familiarize myself a little with a game engine and the process of building a game.

(if anyone has any suggestions on where to go from here, or any tutorials to recommend, i would be overjoyed if they shared! seems like everything is for platformers...)

still working on getting familiar with gamemaker. which is good! i'm learning a lot and i'm pleased with that. all the tutorials i bookmarked are turning out to be less useful than the built-in manual. i had originally planned to use drag & drop exclusively, but i've moved pretty much entirely to GML at this point. it's challenging but a lot more accommodating and satisfying.

the cursor moves! and strobes colours? it seems more efficient to keep the different coloured sprites as subimages, but i'm still figuring out how to make that work properly

and now it snaps to a hexagonal grid! it took me way too many hours to figure out how to do this!!! i'd like to make it move more slowly and be a bit easier to control, but that's for v0.2

final update:

• cursor no longer strobes
• pressing space places tiles of the same colour of the cursor, then changes the cursor to another random colour
• cursor can no longer be placed over an existing tile (....usually. still working on this)
• figured out image index stuff and placed beginning tiles. i'm about 25% of the way through writing a match checking script

with fifteen minutes left, wasp nest is not even close to playable. there just wasn't enough time to make that happen, and honestly? i'm alright with that. i've learned so much about gamemaker over the past week, and what it actually takes to make a game, effort and time-wise. it would be nice if the results were a little prettier, but i'm glad i didn't spend much time on art because i'm already familiar with that. in any case it was a good experience and i feel much more capable of actually creating and finishing a game now!

thank you to cloudhime and lysander for hosting this event!