Thanks for all the kind words! In terms of advice for game development, I’m probably not the best person to ask, because I usually just mess around with a mechanic or concept I think is fun and expand on it, then try to make something of a story out of it and use that to create the world, environment, and basically everything else. For this game, I liked the idea of making a Survivorlike, so before the jam actually began, I made a simple prototype of a submarine that would shoot bubbles that bounced around. When the theme was announced, I made a two-frame walking animation of a cute bomb guy and a zombie bomb, which eventually evolved into Lil’ Bomby’s Nuclear Winter over the course of the jam. Though I didn’t really start development when I made that first prototype, or even use any code from it, it definitely helped with figuring out how to implement the things I wanted to. There are also plenty of tutorials and guides online for making fun game mechanics and even just game development in general that definitely put it much more elegantly than ‘just mess around until something seems fun.’ I’m really happy you liked this and wish you good luck with the next step of your game dev journey!
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Thankyou for your advice! I personally plan all elements of my game and try to develop story and mechanics simulatenously so it's more of a coherent and cohesive design in comparison to story, then mechanics, or mechanics, then story. If you'd like, I'd love to have you as a contact or maybe potentially a team member for an upcoming jam! SBG (my girlfriend) is also really talented in all aspects, especially art, and us 3 would form a power trio. Would be sick for something like a platformer RPG. LMK! My discord is @sonicobg. I'd love to discuss how you got to this level of polish and how you learnt gamedev, whether it was trial and error or like a full on life plan (like me lol). Amazing game!
I also updated/patched my game, your feedback on the bossfight was patched and also the death mechanic actually works now.
Let me know what you think if you get a chance to play the patch.
Cheers!
Yeah, I think developing game elements simultaneously is probably a better system than what I do, but at least for small games like in jams it's worked well enough for me. I mostly learnt gamedev through trial and error, I just do it as a fun hobby, and the only other coding language I know is Scratch block coding, which I spent a little over two years doing before finally switching to Pico-8 about 6 months ago. As for your request to make a team, I'm not really sure about making any commitments just yet, and I think I would prefer to stay solo for now. I'll let you know if I change my mind though!