Yeah, my teenage years were in the 90s, so the SNES era has a special place in my heart. :)  I'm hoping to give Farclip a try on the level designs once I get the main mechanics finished up!

Thanks everyone!  I'm plugging away, though we've had busy weekends and weekday evenings, so I'm getting further little by little!

Here's a glimpse of the work in progress (arrows are guards, blue tiles are guards' line of sight which will change to a normal color later on)!

❤️

Hello!  I'm getting a late start on Speedgame: Classic, but I'm going to be making a game based on Song of Solomon 2:15:

Catch for us the foxes, the little foxes that ruin the vineyards, our vineyards that are in bloom.

There's two parts to this verse: the imagery and the meaning.  The obvious imagery is the foxes, that in ancient Israel they would hide in rocky creices around vineyards and destroy crops, especially the "little foxes" that were small enough to slip through vines unnoticed, chewing through roots, and ruining the harvest.  The meaning, as part of Song of Solomon, is that just like these "little foxes" can destroy a vineyard simply by eating small roots, a relationship could be slowly and quietly eroded by "little" issues like unaddressed arguments, little white lies, or growing resentment that happen slowly over time due to one-off, insignificant-on-their-own situations.  Hurt feelings could be handled in a seemingly good way by saying "it's fine" or even "I forgive you," but the hurt, even if small, remains unaddressed and compounds as circumstances cause more hurt over time.  Eventually, the relationship (the "harvest") is ruined because its roots were slowly nibbled away at by these seemingly insignificant issues when viewed independently.

To that end, I'll be going back to my top-down 2D roots and creating a stealth game where you play as a little fox trying to eat the roots/fruit of the vineyard, but there will be an underlying layer of how this mirrors a relationship; which each victory is a glimpse at the metaphorical damage it does.

Looking forward to seeing how it goes!

<redacted now that it fulfilled its purpose :) > - Thanks for another fun Speedgame!  Great job everyone!

Thank you!

Thanks for playing!  Yes, we wanted to get a "has been watered" indicator and pausing when the dialog box was opened, but as you said, it was blazing toward the deadline all weekend. :D 

Eve and I raced to the finish line, fixing bugs and adding final features up until the deadline!  We're proud of how the game came out, where players can grow crops in exponentially larger farms while listing to a passive-aggressive robot along the way.  We'd love for you to try it out, give us your feedback, and rate our game!

https://itch.io/jam/cgdc-speedgame-hardmode-2026/rate/4600082

Just filled out the survey! :) 

We have a big update with yesterday and this morning's additions!  We how have graphics for the hex plots, their plants, and cursors to indicate what action you'll take when clicking on them (building the plot, planting, watering, or harvesting the crop).  We also have background music and sound effects (ignore the Mario coin sound; it's a placeholder until we get an appropriate one :D )!

Looking good!

Hopefully it'll be fun in the end! :) 

Thanks!

Introducing helpers!  There's only so much you can do within the day/night cycle before there are too many crops to plant, water, and harvest.  By purchasing a helper for a plot, they will automatically harvest any plants that are ready.  You can upgrade them to also water the crops and finally to plant crops on their own, taking on the entire process for that plot.  As you set more helpers in place, it allows you to farm more and more fractals!

Time for prototyping a level 3 fractal!  Once the player has purchased all plots within a level 2 fractal and has planted crops on all of them, they are given the option to expand out to a level 3 fractal, which adds six more level 2 fractals around the original, each with their own plots to purchase and plant in.  It quickly gets challenging to do your farming before the next day dawns!

If you would like to play whatever our latest prototype is throughout this Speedgame, you can find it on our game page: https://mattcolon.itch.io/cgdc-speedgame-hardmode-2026 (password: fractal)

Please share any feedback you have here in this dev blog!

Now that we prototyped the lowest-level gameplay loop on what we consider a level 1 fractal (a single plot), we prototyped extending this out to a level 2 fractal which contains seven plots that you can unlock with the seeds you harvest.  Each plot is purchaseable for an increasing cost, and the player is prevented from spending all their seeds on a plot so they don't soft-lock themselves.

Hello!  My daughter, Eve, and I are working together once again on this year's CGDC Speedgame: Hardmode!  This year we are exploring a game idea that came to me in a dream..

Our game is tentatively called "Fractal Farming."  It is a 2D incremental farming game where your farm grows exponentially as time goes on and you have to find ways to keep up with the workload.  Last night we sat together to iron out the game design and aesthetics, and today we are beginning to prototype the experience.

Here's our first prototype for the lowest-level gameplay loop:

• Plant a seed on an open plot
• Water the seed over four days
• Harvest on the fifth day, then replant
• Additionally, if you miss a day of watering, the plant wilts and must be watered to be healthy enough to continue to grow.  If you don't water enough, it dies.

Note: you can't see my cursor, but I click on the plot to plant, water, and harvest.  When it turns yellow and they dark gray near the end, that's the plant wilting and dying.

Thank you!  I'm glad you enjoyed it. :) 

Good job on your alpha release!  I liked the need to balance visibility and survivability; it was reminiscent of the Doom 3 mechanics where you have to choose between a gun and your flashlight when traversing and fighting within dark hallways.

Some feedback for ways to make improvements to the gameplay are:

• It could help to provide more feedback when the player is hit, something like a mini screen shake or moving the player slightly.
• The darkness and pause cause a break in the gameplay and detract from the experience.  Instead of fading to black when switching between the sword and lantern, you could simply expand or contract the diameter of the light source while switching tools.  This will allow the player to maintain control rather than having to pause during the transition, and it will ensure that visibility is maintained rather than always going to darkness.
• It would be great to have some visual or audio cues for how the switches relate to the door.  I had thought I ran into a bug when I hit both switches but nothing happened to the door, and only later remembered about the interact button.  If the doors cracked open a little, that would let the player know something changed, or better yet, just have the door open entirely (and close behind the player if you don't want them to backtrack).
• I liked the boss mechanics of stunning it and then attacking, though there are a few things that could help that encounter.  For one, ensure that the red and blue sparkles remain visible in the darkness rather than blocked by line of sight; I lost the boss a few times because of that, then when rounding the corner I got attacked.  Also, the second phase seemed like it had the same mechanics, but because of the regularly-spawning enemies it was difficult to find the boss once they teleported away.  Possibly because of the same line of sight issue, I was not able to find the boss again and ended up dying to the enemies.

Looking forward to how you continue to develop this game!

I don't have it for Android and this is a web app version, but you can play it on any browser at darkchess.omnipoof.com :) 

Thank you!

We made some good progress today on art, narrative updates, and the dialogue UI!  In particular, the dialogue now shows the face of the dog being talked with and their text is scrollable in the dialogue.  Tomorrow will be a big push to pull it all together, in particular building the map and setting up the scenes for each day of the nurse's shift, so that we have a cohesive experience bringing hope to dogs that are struggling to have any. :) 

Looking forward to seeing what you create!

Hello!  My name is Matt Colón, and I'll be using this devlog to share what my daughter, Eve, and I are building for CGDC Speedgame: Hardmode 2025.  The theme is "Hope in the Darkness," so we decided to take on a game idea brought up by Matt_SdgGames on the PxlPug Community Discord server about a hospice for dogs.  It provides a space for discussing hope in the midst of grief and loss, but without it being so close to home if the characters were all human.

I am focusing on building the systems and mechanics that we'll need for the game, while Eve focuses on narrative design and art.

Goals

Each game jam I try to learn something new, so this time I wanted to do two things in particular:

• Learn more about Unity UI (it's still a bit of a mystery to me)
• Learn how to read in Twine's .twee files for use in dialogue trees

The latter is so that Eve can create dialogue trees for each dog on each day, and we can import their data into C# objects to display the conversation node by node using a dialog box in the UI.  That way we don't have to hard code anything in Unity and can simply read in all the dialogue via .twee files!

Progress

We put our focus on the systems, mechanics, and narrative first to get the foundation laid.  After a little over 24 hours, Eve and I were able to prototype the following:

• Dialogue for seven dogs that will be in the story across a nurse's five day shift (first draft of the narrative done!)
• Reading in Twine's .twee files and turning them into C# objects to use in dialogue trees (goal achieved already!)
• Player movement and interaction with other characters to initiate dialogue
• Displaying the dialogue node by node with the player choosing which direction to take the conversation, then returning control to the player once the dialogue is over

Here's a clip of the prototype in action!

Glad you like it!  Yeah, the Survivors-like mechanics can breathe new life into a lot of retro games!

My pleasure!  I was thinking, perhaps the player's car could be configurated by default to be unable to catch the yellow car due to speed, maneuverability, etc., so getting a few powerups would be required; in addition to the challenge of catching the yellow car, the player would be juggling how many powerups to get, which ones, and when to stop grabbing them.  I believe right now you can fully avoid the powerups and catch up to the yellow car with some good driving, so I could imagine seeing the yellow car slowly pulling further ahead would give the player the motivation to swing to the side and grab a speed boost powerup to continue the pursuit. :) 

It's always the case with game jams to have the small regret of what couldn't be done, but that's the point: put constraints on yourself to generate innovative ideas, and then afterward if you want to expand upon the entry, you have a strong foundation (and the time) to do so. :) 

Thanks for playing!  I agree, I would love to have given the game a better intro, with at least a title screen to set some context.  And yes, the more you play the more you start getting a feel for the enemy spawning patterns, how to better use the orbiting flames effectively (at times I use them like a scythe through a group of enemies or as a spear to poke a nearby enemy), and when to use and preserve the transformation (such as transforming right when you are about to get swarmed might not be safe, so you need to give it a little bit of a buffer to finish).  That's what I've enjoyed about Survivors-like games, discovering the patterns and practicing the mechanics until you can do some cool strategies with them! :) 

Thanks, I appreciate you playing it!  While I may or may not extend this game, I do want to take a lot of what I've learned to build out some other Survivors-like prototypes I have in mind.

Glad you found it! :D  But yes, I can see how it can be less noticeable that it's going down while centered since you don't have as much of a point of reference with a bar that small.

One thing I wish I had time to have improved is the indication that the HP went to 1 when transformed.  Right now, it reflects as a single pixel-wide health bar, but it's not really visible with the flame effects and attacks everywhere, so it might seem like the health bar disappears.  I also didn't want to play "Zelda low hearts" sound when transformed, because that would be annoying, though possibily appropriate for the non-transformed mode. :) 

Thanks for playing!  The HP bar is right under the player, and it decreases as they take damage.  However, it sounds like it could be more noticeable. :) 

Thanks for trying it out!

That was fun to play!  I liked trying to keep up with the yellow car, even going off-road as needed to catch up.  Balancing the desire to power up vs. conserve gas was a good use of "Strength through Weakness;" do I want to take on the weakness of more easily getting a game over in order to power up in some manner?

It could be nice for the power-ups to spawn more randomly around the track rather than right behind the yellow car.  Sometimes I would try to ram it from behind and accidentally pick up a newly-spawned power-up, which made me have to deal with the unexpected new gas-consumption weakness.  Also, an arrow pointer toward the yellow car would be great when it's off-screen to know where to find it; the first time I tried it I hadn't even seen the yellow car, so I wasn't sure what I was supposed to do.

Great job!

I started getting Little Kitty, Big City vibes when I started. :)  It was fun to run around the city as a cat, and it wasn't until I was about to quit that I saw you could also control a person.  I got them to meet and the cat to follow, but I wasn't sure where to go next.  Was there a destination to reach?

I enjoyed playing through this!  It was an interesting concept.  I did run into an issue near the end of finding all the spirits to defeat, since I had to try to infer where they might spawn to get them to appear.  I was stuck at 3 for a few minutes until I finally found the alley where they spawned. :) 

This was fun and hilarious at the same time. :D  I loved those moments when I was able to string together a number of well-timed pushes to rocket the rock up the hill, but equally enjoyed the times when I over-jumped the rock and wanted it tumble into oblivion.

I know this is a wonky-controls/physics type of game, but it probably could benefit from some tightened jump mechanics, where you can jump high holding space down or jump slightly to reposition yourself, especially when trying to get through some of the timing/positioning-specific parts of the hill.  Also, I was on a roll (no pun intended) getting the rock up the hill, then somehow my body instantly went to the top of the background object and my head got stuck there.  I was so sad, because that was my best run yet! :D 

I liked the visual cohesiveness of the game and trying to get to all the balloons before the bears get you. :)  It was nice to have the playful music in the background and the satisfying "pop" whenever I reached a balloon.

I wasn't quite sure how the "Strength through Weakness" theme played out in this, though.  If it was there, perhaps there's a way to make it shine out a bit more. (Edit: I missed the "View game page" link at the top, so I see now that the "Strength through Weakness" theme was through the type of player character rather than through game mechanics. :) )  Also, I wonder if having the bears be invincible would help drive the player to focus on the task of popping balloons by having an ever-present danger.  During my first playthrough I just kept running with the bears on my tail, but then I realized on my second playthrough, to see what happens when I die, that you could actually defeat the bears by stomping on them twice; this meant I could clear out the building of bears and then take my time getting to all of the balloons, which wasn't as much fun as running for my life. :D 

It's great to see a tabletop game entry; I think this is the first time I've seen one since I started participating in the Speedgames!  The "Strength in Weakness" bonus is nice since usually the weakest stat is something you'd want to avoid using, but here it could be a boon even better than your strongest stat!

What could help improve the instructions could be some step-by-step examples of how to play through certain parts of the game, especially to explain some ambiguous parts of the game.  For example, if I get the legendary hammer that maxes out strength to 40(?), then do I automatically defeat every strength-based villain since the max strength I would need to win based on rolling a d6 is 12 strength?  Also, a minor visual improvement could be to put the dock under the grid lines to show that it spans six squares; at first glance, it wasn't clear that the dock represented places to land until I saw the villain and "Stay safe" marks on it and inferred from there.

Thanks for playing, and glad it was a good experience for you!