Now that it's 4 days in, I figured it's probably a good time to start writing a proper devlog. This isn't my first time doing a game jam, but it's been a long time since my last one. I've started and ending up dropping so many game dev projects and jams over the past few years, and the only game I've ever finished and published was a short platformer called Extendobot for a Gameboy-jam a few years ago.

     I always end having extremely grand ideas, so I'm really trying my best to limit the scope of this project and not hurt myself with feature creep. I decided to go with a top- down exploration game, since I wanted an excuse to try making a sprite stacking "fake 3d" engine in Game Maker Studio. I'm taking the cold theme literally, with the player having to constantly search for a new source of warmth in a cold and uncaring environment. I looked a lot at Nium, Titan Souls, and Hyper Light Drifter for inspiration

1/25 - 1/26
     The first 2 days of the jam I mostly spent digging up old code for the 3d rendering and looking up youtube tutorials. I had a hard time getting the layering and depth sorting to work out properly, but eventually I was able to get it to a point I was happy with.

1/27
     Monday I didn't have a massive amount of time to work, but I did fix up the rendering a bit more to support flat billboarded sprites and drew a better sprite for the player character. 

1/28
    Tuesday was a bust. I spent all of my time trying to get the player to move in the proper direction relative to the camera. (Pressing left moves the player left with respect to the screen, not left with regards to the engines XY axes.) The only thing of note I did was draw sprites for all 4 directions the player can face.
    That's where I stand as of right now. By tonight I'd like to get this movement issue sorted out, so I can start to work on more actual content. I'll also need to come up with a title for the game at some point. I'll also update these screenshots with higher resolution ones when I get the chance. Thanks to anybody that bothered reading through all this rambling!

Edit:Looks like the pictures didn't upload properly, or at least I can't see them on my phone. I'll need to fix those later if they don't show up for anyone else either.

Edit 2: Pictures Fixed?

[Devlog] 1/29!

I finally managed to fix that movement issue! Now that that’s over with, I started to mess around with implementing the base mechanics for the warmth system. Then this happened.

Edit: Apparently itch.io is being weird and not letting me embed this gif? All images are acting funky on this site for some reason, even my icon shows as an error despite it working fine a week ago when I first changed it.

Edit 2:Gif fixed?

[Devlog] 1/30 - 1/31

Actual progress made these past two nights! I’ve sat down and fully planned out the game’s mechanics, story, and a list of assets I’ll need to make, as well as what days of the the jam I plan to have each portion done by. The game actually has a proper title now, so now I can introduce everyone to The Heart Grows Cold! The camera now smoothly pans and rotates to follow the player throughout the level. It also turns to follow the level geometry without any input from the player. I’ve finished the lighting effects for the player’s torch, as well as set up the backbones needed to interact with future enemies. I can also toggle a special “cinematic mode” which locks the player’s input and draws black bars at the top and bottom of the screen.

[Devlog] 2/1 to 2/3 I haven’t had much time to post, but luckily this time I have actual content to show at least. I’m almost running out of things to program at this rate, and the end of the game is actually looking like I might make it if I work hard enough. At this point, all of the underlying mechanics are done except for the enemies, which hopefully shouldn’t be that complicated to implement thanks to the way I’ve planned to make them.

The player has full walking and running animations for all directions, and they can now activate bonfire checkpoints when they walk up to them.(Totally not dark souls) The torch and bonfire also have the necessary glow and particle effects. I think I’m satisfied with the overall look of everything I’ve been messing with on the test map, I just need to make some basic grass/rocks and other bits of scenery to break things up a little bit.

If the player’s torch goes out and they aren’t near a source of heat, their warmth will slowly start to decrease until they succumb to the cold and respawn at the last bonfire they activated.

Things left to do:

• Program enemies(Only have 2 planned, and they both should be relatively easy to implement. Getting hurt by them will suck warmth from the player, eventually making them die from cold using the same system I’ve already implemented.
• Draw a ton of environment graphics(Shouldn’t be too hard, I’ve never had a problem with basic pixel art and the art style I’m going with is pretty simple.
• Make the final maps. (Should be pretty quick as long as I follow my design doc.)
• Cutscenes and title screen. (This might hang me up a little bit, nothing is too complicated or hard to make. This is just the type of thing that usually can distract you and distract you with being perfectionist too much.
• Audio (Hopefully I’ll have time to even do this. Audio has always been my weakest link in every project I’ve ever tried to make. I usually never even get around to it.)

I’ve been looking at lots of the other projects around here too, and I can’t wait to see all the finished projects! Everybody do your best and don’t lose sight of things, we’re almost there!

[Devlog] 2/4 to 2/5

Alright, I’ve got the enemies working in a way I’m satisfied with!

When the player approaches them, these wolves will slowly approach before orbiting the player.

While orbiting the player, the wolves will occasionally attempt to leap at you, if they touch you, they sap the warmth from your body.

If you raise your torch’s light while facing down a wolf, you’ll begin to sap energy from it that warms you back up. With only 3 days left, it looks like I’ll have to cut a handful of things I originally wanted to include in the game. If I’m able to finish the essentials fast enough, hopefully I’ll have enough time to add some more things to the experience.

Things left to do:

*Draw a ton of environment graphics(Shouldn’t be too hard, I’ve never had a problem with basic pixel art and the art style I’m going with is pretty simple.

*Make the final maps. (Should be pretty quick as long as I follow my design doc.)

*Cutscenes and title screen. (This might hang me up a little bit, nothing is too complicated or hard to make. This is just the type of thing that usually can distract you and distract you with being perfectionist too much.

*Audio (Hopefully I’ll have time to even do this. Audio has always been my weakest link in every project I’ve ever tried to make. I usually never even get around to it.)

[Devlog][Post-Mortem] Posting this a little late, but I haven’t haf much free time these past few days. Life ended up getting in the way of my last 3 days of development time, and I found it difficult to get as much work done as I had originally wanted to.

2/6

I didn’t have time to take any screenshots, but I ended up spending most of this day just drawing any and all graphics and art assets I would need. Most of these assets ended up getting used in some way in the demo, so it wasn’t a total waste. I still wished I could’ve got more work done this day, though. T

2/7-2/8

I started things out strong, trying to create each map for the game according to my design doc, but I was unfortunately barely able to complete the first map by the end of Friday. Without any work even started on the audio, I knew the only way I would be able to submit anything would be to create a short demo of the game instead of trying to power through and finish something half-baked.

I ended up cutting the title sequence and audio entirely, and instead focused on making a short map sequence that ended with a simple cutscene. It’s nothing fancy, but it shows off the art style and core gameplay quite well, and I’m proud of what I was able to get done in the time I took.

https://mental-inaction.itch.io/the-heart-grows-cold

The main thing I learned from this jam is that even after I’ve scoped down, I need to scope down even further. I spent nearly the first week and a half of the jam just working on gameplay systems and rendering, when I should’ve had that done the first few days of the jam. I didn’t properly set aside enough time to make the actual content of the game.

Now that the jam is over, I’m looking back over the game and seeing what scrapped parts I’m willing add back in and what parts of the engine/gameplay need to be cleaned up and fixed. I’d really like to try completing and finishing this project, hopefully in time for the 7 day Roguelike Challenge at the end of this month.