Mai-chan's SWEET BUNS
Louis／Web developer & comic artist
In this deliciously tricky puzzle game, you must grab Mai-chan's SWEET BUNS to stop them falling into the wrong hands! The nefarious RAT KING and his dastardly râtisserie will stop at nothing to ensure the world only eats nasty SAVOURY BUNS!

Picking this one was a no-brainer. I already knew I wanted to make an  action-puzzler, and the artwork on this cartridge is stellar.

Three days (keeping a comfortable pace) in and it's almost something playable (although the  graphics don't really do the cartridge justice quite jet). 

The game is written in Elm, a  purely functional language that more game developers should try out.

Status

As of Friday it is now (theoretically) possible to reach a 'Game over'. You lose whenever the board fills up and all the ingredient spawning tiles are covered by ingredients.

The high priorities right now are (in no particular order):

• Figuring out the correct board size
• Deciding on turn based vs. real time
• Getting started on aesthetics

Status

These days go by a design philosophy that a although a game should be interesting to design, it should be more interesting to play. The logic behind it is that if the reverse is true, if the game is more interesting to design than to play, then it will never be completed because the designer will just keep designing on it forever.

The short version of this weeks progress  is that I might have passed the point where the game is  more fun to play than work on. Although there is definitely still lot to tweak I actually find my self getting distracted from working on the game because I incidentally started playing it instead. This is a good sign, even though it has a slight negative impact on productivity.

Highest priority right now (in no particular order):

• Fine tune gameplay (drop rates, difficulty etc)
• Improve UX to reduce cognitive strain (make it easier to see what's going on)
• Unicode emojis -> Sprites

I've replaced the Unicode emojis with sprites. Graphics are really an Ugly Baby at the moment. I have slightly better stuff, but it's still literally just on paper.

The debug is hidden; there is now some room for score, combo counter and all that stuff.

Looks like the jam just got a time extension, so I don't have to ship it in this state.

10 days to go and graphics is the sprites and their graphics are slowly falling into place (no pun intended).

Also Elm 0.19 was released recently. It's a bit tempting to start porting and toying with new built in onAnimationFrame , but I might also be me getting distracted from the "Must haves".

Top priority:

• Sprites!
• Score!
• UX hints

The game is  submitted, although it's still a prototype and in need of a lot of tweaking (and graphics and sounds and levels and features and..).
I recently started at new (day) job. The place is really sweet and everyone there is helpful (and really smart!), so it if very fun. There is also a lot to learn, so I'm fairly drained when I get home  😵.
This prototype really has potential though. So I'm hoping to get back to it once things have settled a bit.