Joining in with TeaHands' devlog idea!
I'm Ena, I've worked in the industry as a designer for a couple of years already but about 2 month ago I decided I wanted to learn coding in Godot. So this jam came at the perfect time for me to try out (semi) solo dev. Semi because my walking debugger partner does help out wherever i get stuck in the code.
This is also my first game jam ever!
Day 1: Concept and Feasibility
Even before the theme got announced, I knew I wanted to go Eldritch and pixel art, because that's what I love doing most. I was a bit stumped on the theme at first, to beb honest, but took about 1h to sit down and mockup up something in aseprite. As I have a 2 y.o. kid, I have to be strict on using the free time I have available, even if it means going for the more obvious choices.
Making the goose the villain was obvious, but I found it funny, so I kept at it. While I was pushing pixels around, throwing random UI elements on the scene that I thought could fit, the game's design slowly crept into my head. And with it the first big challenge as well.
I needed the goose's neck to extend and retract, and attack the player in some yet undefined way (we gotta "duck" somehow, right?). But how to do that? Especially with pixel art? Gladly I had an afternoon at the playground to think it over.
I despaired over the setup of DampenedSpringJoint2Ds for a solid three hours, because they kept exploding in all directions or jumping aorund like monkeys the seocnd I moved the head. But finally, this somehow worked. Literally every "neck ball" (all 8 of them, might need to add more), is on their own collision layer, because this close they would push each other around. Making them small would always end up with exploding goose necks, for whatever reason, and actually the larger I made them the more stabble the whole setup ended up being. I'm done with trying to understand it, I'll just pray to the Ghooth it will hold up until the end of the jam.
Day 2: More neck physics and first gameplay
My availabble time on Thursday was spent ironing out the specific settings of the neck setup (to the result above), and implementing a few first gameplay things, such as a moving character, collisions on the single game scene, and making some more pixel art ... I also tried my hands at moving the duck's head at a target, but it failed miserably and eventually I called it quits to focus on the actual gameplay. I'm hoping to get my partner to code that part for me :D
Really not too much happened that day, except I added a truck and managed to make it transparent if the player passes behind it. Sounds simple, but for a code noob like me, this felt really satisfying to get right on the first try!
Day 3: Trucks
The truck got 99% of its gameplay behavior today!There will be multiple, and they will deliver the Ghooth's food that the player has to then bring the Ghooth. They can now move into the scene, keep track of how full they are, leave when they're empty, and the player can pick up the food from the truck and carry it around ... All that's missing for the trucks now is a little bit of randomization, but i'm leaving that for later, because I'm not clear on the design yet.
Tonight, I'm hoping to at least finish the player handing the food to the Ghooth (without animating the thing... I'm still very afraid) and maybe even getting in the Ghooth's request - if you don't feed it the right thing in time, it will eat one of the other cultists! (I think... if it works out... let's see...)
