Oh my god, I made a game. There isn't a lot to it, a total of 4 screens, and all you really do is go right, but it's done. It barely meets the optional theme.
The goal of the game is to find something to drink- and the only vending machine is on the other side of the mall.
Clearly, I didn't keep this devlog updated, but between my day job, learning how to use Game Maker2/GML, and making assets for the project, the devlog fell through the cracks. Although, I did personally track my progress, and I'll do my best to format it for a devlog.
Most of, if not all of the first week of the jam was devoted to just learning Game Maker 2. Starting on 7/17/18, I started looking into whatever I could find in the way of learning Game Maker 2 from the perspective of the absolute beginner. I ran through the built-in GM2 Demos, both for DnD, and Code. At first, I thought I could get away with doing the whole project in DnD, and very quickly realized that I would not be able to. I shifted gears, and dove into GML tutorials. Read a lot of the documentation, watched a lot of videos. On 7/18, I threw together a test sprite and I managed to put this together.
<-- Testguy
While this isn't the most exciting thing ever, seeing Testguy move and jump in response to the inputs kind of blew my mind.
I ended up hitting a standstill from the 19th to the 22nd, as I went on a 3 day trip with my roommates.
From the 23rd to the 26th, most of the work for the actual project happened. I decided that the game was going to be something SUPER basic- all you really do is move to the right and jump. Since this was my first game jam, even with the two week period, I wanted something I could finish.
For a long time, my project looked like this. No tiles, no background.
I learned very quickly that making background tiles is really hard, but I'll take not-great-but-done over amazing-but-unfinished.
The last big hurdle that I had was audio, I'd never made sound effects (for games or otherwise), and I definitely have no experience with music composition, or theory. The sound effect issue was resolved easily enough, as I found the link to rfxgen on an old Ludum Dare resource list. Through that same resource list, I also found Bosca Ceoil.
I wanted to try and approximate vaporwave, but I was literally just clicking notes until I got something that sounded cohesive- and I mean that in the loosest sense of the word.
WOW. Despite how simple and lacking in gameplay the end product is, it's a start. I learned a lot - mostly GML and programming principles (too many to list or remember off hand as I write this), how to use audio tools, how hard it is to make tile sets, and working under a deadline. There may not have been a lot at stake, but I definitely felt the pressure.
Side note, I tried using Habitica to keep myself on track while I worked on this jam. I don't know how much it I can attribute to it, but I can't say it was a nonfactor, which is pretty interesting to me since I've always been kinda skeptical of gamifying productivity.
As final note, I'm really glad I took part in this game jam; thanks to the hosts for putting this on. I happened upon this game jam on my tumblr feed. I always wanted to try doing game development, but a combination of real life and me just putting it off for one reason or another. I always thought I wouldn't be able to do it. Hopefully, I'll continue learning and making game and take part in future jams.
Thanks for reading.