Gracias, lo necesitaba.
Gonzalo Delgado
Creator of
Recent community posts
Great demo! I've been listening to your podcast so it was nice to finally see all the things you were talking about :)
While playing I kept wishing for a shield of some sort, or being able to shoot at the fireballs as a form of defense.
I got to the baby dragon boss, and while it's very challenging with the slimes and everything, it felt like the charge attack was too slow and often didn't aim at me at all. If the charge attack is made faster, maybe make it wait until there aren't many fireballs on screen though. I had a lot of fun playing the demo, great work!
That makes total sense, thanks! I do see the placeholder is unpolished, but the aesthetics are more appealing to me, specifically, the bigger eyes, smaller legs and fringe shape I like better on the 1st version, as well as the color saturation.
I'm not saying the latest version isn't the better one or that it should be changed in any way! That is definitely the better choice for the game, great work :)
Hello Internet!
I'm going to attempt making a very simple Smash TV clone (probably just a single level) out of this cart:
The idea is to have WASD+mouse controls initially, but also support twin sticks if available. I'm thinking the core gameplay will be to just survive as long as possible.
I'll try to post daily updates here.
Goodbye Internet!
Wow, thanks a lot for giving it a try and posting suggestions!
I'm aware of the controls being sloppy, and I'm planning on improving on them, but I don't know how to code proper controls yet.
I'm still learning how to do animations, but I'll try adding basic "poof" when an enemy is killed as a placeholder so it doesn't feel confusing.
Thanks again for your kind post, really appreciate it. I'm continuing to work on this game and posting updates in its devlog if you're interested.
Post mortem
OK, game is far from finished, but I submitted what I have as a "playable demo", and will continue working on it for #1GAM (I'm giving myself a 33 days deadline).
I really liked the experience, and learned a lot in very little time, so I wanted to share what I learned here.
Just do it!
It's obvious, but the days I started to work on the game right after (and sometimes during) breakfast proved to be the most productive. I have been learning how to focus for a while now, but participating in this jam helped put a lot of what I learned in practice.
Pixel art takes time!
I'm very new to pixel art, I took an Udemy course earlier this year and had been practicing a bit, but this jam really put my small knowledge to the test, and I have to say that's where I failed the most. I found myself trying to rush it, and getting frustrated because I was never able to make the assets look the way I wanted them to look. So I learned I'll have to take my time with it, and practice a lot more. This is something I want to learn and become good or at least decent at.
Game programming isn't too hard!
Don't know if I mentioned this, but my day job is web development, so I'm coding most of the day. I have been trying to learn how to make games for a couple of years now, and at first the programming part felt quite intimidating because there seemed to be a lot of math and advanced algorithms involved, and a lot of coding seemed to be required for the most basic stuff. But this turned out to be the easy part!
I love gamedev!
I sometimes thought learning how games are made would take the "magic" out of videogames, and I wouldn't enjoy playing them as much. I was so wrong! This makes the experience so much more enjoyable, as now I can look at games with a different, but positive, perspective, and thoughts about how a pattern or movement is coded, or how a sprite or background are put together start popping into my head. This is especially true when playing entries for this jam. I love it!
Anyway, I'll continue working on SharkBlaster. I'll try to keep posting devlop entries, but to it's official devlog now :-)
Thanks a lot for reading!
Hey, thanks a lot for the encouragement! It really means a lot :)
I didn't have time to work on the game this weekend, and with one day left, I'm afraid I won't make it. I will keep pushing and hopefully finish a level and submit that, and then keep working on it for #1GAM.
I did learn a lot during this jam, especially that I need to practice pixel art a lot more, because it takes me a long time to do something that looks really bad, so my plan going forward is to do at least 1hr of it every day (I appreciate any suggestions on that too!).
Anyway, thanks again for your message and advice.
Day 10
Spent about an hour and a half today to add a new enemy (finally!). It looks awful, so I won't post a scaled up image, but you can see it in action in this gameplay GIF:
I don't think I'll be able to finish, and even then, the game will surely be as bad as the pixel art, if not worse! But I'll keep pushing through, it's my first attempt, and I want to continue making games after this one :)
Thanks for reading and bearing with me!
Day 9
No time today. Only managed to do a small code cleanup update: use a Map to associate enemy type strings (defined in Tiled) with classes. This way, now I have a base Enemy class, and can have a subclass for each type of enemy.
This is possible thanks to Haxe's reflection API, which I learned about today :-)
OK, too much coding for today, I have to turn to graphics and level design.
Bye!
Day 8
So glad the deadline was extended! Although I'm starting to feel I won't make it!
Anyways, didn't get to do much work until today and I spent a ton of time trying to load enemy sprites from the tiled map data.
I finally did it, and improved my understanding on how to work with Tiled, but I think I took longer than I needed.
Here's what that looks like:
I hope to make more progress in the time left!
See you!
Day 6
Hello again!
Only a couple of things done today:
- Level progression code (next level file is loaded and playstate is reset when the current level is finished)
- Better movement code
With a few days left, I'm trying to think what the are the most important things I need to focus on in order to have a playable game in time.
Anyway, I hope to be back tomorrow with another update, but weekends are a bit crazy!
Day 5
Hi there!
Accomplished a few things today :D
- Sidescrolling!
- Added gamepad support
- Added README file
- Hid mouse pointer
Obligatory in-progress GIF:
See you tomorrow!
Day 4
Hello again Internet!
Made good progress today:
- Listed potential enemies
- Enemies can now be placed using Tiled and even get damage and health values from the editor
- Implemented basic enemy placement and movement code
- Implemented initial hurt and damage logic (you can kill enemies and even die now!)
You can try it yourselves here: http://gonzalodelgado.com/SharkBlaster :-)
Be seeing you!
Day 3
Whoa, didn't have time to work on this until today (you know, life gets in the way).
Not much done today either:
- updated the code with the new sprite
- made the player shoot in the facing direction
- uploaded the code to GitLab (GPLv3 baby!): https://gitlab.com/gonzalodelgado/sharkblaster
- setup pipelines to automate builds, and upload "playable" versions here: http://gonzalodelgado.com/SharkBlaster
Anyway, there's a lot more to do, not sure if I'll finish before the deadline, but I'll keep on pushing forward!
The graphics are combinations of photos I'm manipulating (mostly with an
android app that I'm emulating on my PC believe it or not. I've come
up with a strange workflow for making these) Then I touch them up /
modify in aseprite.
Interesting, hope that's more fun than it sounds! ^_^
Can't wait to play it!