Ninja geese! Thepurple joke makes it so much funnier :D

Just a quick update from the rest of the long weekend as we mostly used it to lounge around, attempt surgery on a dying houseplant, watch all the Resident Evil films back to back for some reason, and then stay up for Monsterdon on Sunday which didn’t even start until 2am UK time.

I did a lot of behind the scenes stuff to turn what I already have into an actually working (if extremely basic) game loop, which included various backend things you can’t see but also a placeholder UI with goose count and birdwatching reputation bar.

And a notebook, although this is a 3d scene and as I went to take this screenshot a bird wandered through it so I’ll have to make sure they stop moving when the notebook is open, whoops! First time that’s happened, maybe I’d never have noticed the issue if not for taking screenies for these devlogs. Thanks, one person who reads these devlogs!

Most of the rest of my time was bugfixing but also still trying to figure out animations in Blender. Why do they sometimes get duplicated, or even eaten? What is a timeline vs an action editor vs an NLA editor? And if I accidentally hit tab, how do I get my keyframes back so I don’t have to keep making backup files to revert to?!* Yesterday was a frustrating day, can you tell? 😅

Anyway. Onwards and birdwards!

* I did figure this part out, at least

It is ONE DAY until teaser videos are due and I still don’t really have a game as such. Through the power of video editing though, maybe I can make it look like I do.

To that end, I made a quick list of what I’d like to record for the video and therefore what things really needed to be polished up before then versus what can wait until after that deadline. This is an interesting approach because usually my problem is I get bogged down in building systems and only remember it has to look like a game on the last day of a jam.

So I made some basic UI icons to replace the placeholders! They’re still kind of placeholder but better than nowt.

And then, instead of continuing a triumphant list of easy wins, I got stuck trying to get an outline shader to work and got myself in a right mess.

Thankfully Fedi came to the rescue, as they always do, and put me on the right track. So after a tiny amount of skiving off work this morning I also have outlines!

Also made a quick animation for the ducks if you try and falsely accuse them of actually being geese.

Small steps, but if you take enough of those you end up getting where you need to go.

Tonight is our fantasy football draft, so not much if any free time, but I’ll hopefully be able to squeeze in a bit of devving tomorrow afternoon / early evening and grab everything I need for the video submission at 11pm (UK time).

Then, you know, actually turn it into a game over the weekend maybe? 😅

Whew, yesterday was stressful for all of us jammers I think! But at the last second, the organisers came in clutch and decided to extend the deadline for the teaser videos, which was very handy as I’d thought it worked out as 11pm UK time but it was actually 9pm so I was in a slight rush for a minute there 😅

Still, happy with what I managed to cobble together within the time limit especially since I was feeling pretty under the weather yesterday too. (I did not have time to balance the audio so be ready on your volume settings if it’s too loud, sorry)

I’m not saying I’ll make teasers for all my jam entries in future, that would be madness. But the planning part definitely helped me polish some bits up much earlier than I usually would, and I think that’s been really helpful, so maybe I’ll adopt that part in future projects and just make the actual video in my head!

Anyway.

Plans for the weekend basically involve making all the missing kinds of birds, adding sfx to the game instead of just to the trailer (movie magic, baby!), and figuring out why sometimes some kinds of ducks stand on the water instead of swimming in it despite sharing their code with all the other ducks that work fine 🤷‍♀️

Siiiigh.

Well, the jam deadline has been and gone and I did not submit this game. Turns out, the game idea itself wasn’t the overly ambitious part, the “spending two weeks making a game without something major interrupting” was the overly ambitious part. So we had a real life thing come up at the weekend and I had to abandon my dreams of glory. Such is life!

My goals for this jam were to:

a) Learn more about rigging and animating in Blender without it feeling so precarious like it’s all about to stop working if I press a single key wrong.

b) Learn about navigation agents in Godot in a small self-contained project without two years of legacy spaghetti making it more complicated.

Both of these were a massive success, and I’ll be using all this new knowledge in my main city builder project. Hooray!

As a bonus I also learned an important optimisation technique for particle systems in web exports, and generally got to practise my low poly modelling. And of course, I learned a lot about the differences between ducks and geese.

I’d love to say I’ll finish the game anyway and update this post with a link, but we all know that probably won’t happen. Still, after a week or so break I’ll hopefully be ready to take part in the anniversary edition of the Godot Wild Jam, so if anyone wants to join me for that one feel free :D

Congrats to everyone who actually did submit, special shoutouts to obscure gods and Brandon Saiz for joining my devlog initiative, and I’m off to play your games now!