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Thanks! :D I didn't want to spend too much time on art because there was so much to do, but doodling the little UI icons was fun. 

I really wish I'd done more gifs of the spells but I guess you'll be able to try it out for yourself soon? :P

This devlog has been very silent because while I've been working hard, I've been working on trying to implement pathfinding for my enemies. As something I'd never done before, this took much, much longer than I anticipated. I wasted at least a day trying to figure it out on my own before realising there were algorithms for this sort of thing already worked out. Another day was lost trying to figure out how to translate A* into actual code. Then there was a lot of time spent writing hundreds of lines of code and trying to fix all the bugs that hundreds of lines of code will throw up.

The good news: I learnt a lot about pathfinding! It works exactly as I want it to and now I have it there is actually gameplay that can occur.

The bad news: I still don't have a 'game', as such, and strictly speaking two weeks from the start of the jam will have passed by the time I wake up. This is my priority list of stuff to work on during the last day:

1.  Stairs, aka the goal at the end of the level. 
2.  Doors. I would really like for there to be some delaying tactics that aren't just spells.
3.  Wait button. At the moment you can choose to do nothing on your turn by pressing 'T', but without a tutorial there won't be any indication of that as is. It's a good way to restore your magicka if nothing is currently chasing you, so it seems important to include.
4.  Spirit Guardians. At the minute the only enemy type in the game is Stone Guardians, and they don't even have their door/block smashing ability. Enemies that call for a different approach seems like a good addition to a currently very sparse game.
5.  Level map! This is the really important one, and is likely to get bumped up the list if I can't finish the previous items quickly enough. Having an actual level to play through would go a long way to making this a game rather than just an uninteresting prototype. (It's still absolutely a prototype though.)
6.  Treasure/buffs. Loot is a big part of roguelikes so it would be nice to have some temporary buffs that the player can pick up throughout the level.
7.  Movable blocks. A companion to doors in that they're environmental ways of delaying enemies. 
8.  The Stone Guardians' Break ability. I originally planned for Stone Guardians to be able to break through doors and blocks after a few turns. 

I have absolutely no idea how much of that is feasible (probably less than I think) but I would really like to be able to submit something vaguely game-like! I intend to keep working on this after the jam so it's not a huge loss if I can't make something playable in time. Would still be kind of disappointing.

Good luck to anyone still working on their game! I'm really looking forward to seeing what people have come up with once the deadline has passed. :D

Oh gosh, everything about this is adorable!

Day 4

Been kind of tired (Turns out it's harder to make games on a day when you have work than on a weekend. Who knew?) but I've managed to get a bit of work in every day.

Unfortunately I'm still working on the spells, but I'm very close to being done! Ice Wall now makes walls of ice that melt after 5 turns. Walls, ice walls and water now can't be walked into and will stop enemies being pushed back by Water Jet if an enemy is knocked into them. I just need to add a bit more code and Water Walk should let you pass over water!

Thanks! I hope I can make a game you enjoy failing at! :P

Haha, nope. Wellspring is just a water-themed name I grabbed at random so I didn't have a nameless game. It also serves as the name of the McGuffin that the player is delving for. Unless you were planning on naming your game after that particular town you should be fine to just leave it as it is. :P

Thanks for the kind words!

Day 2

Didn't make as much progress as I would have liked today, but I got the UI and magicka bar bits of the magic system working at least. The magicka bar will deplete as you cast spells and regenerate a little each 'turn' when you are not casting a spell (which at the moment means every time you make a move). If you don't have enough magicka, you can't cast the spell (as you would expect!).

You can also select the two spells other than Water Jet but this won't actually do anything visible yet. Hoping to get Ice Wall and Water Walk implemented tomorrow so I can move on to enemies. (And also, at some point, make walls be solid.)

Thanks! I'm hoping I can actually do the concept justice.

Day 1

I made a test room with the three basic kinds of tiles (wall, floor and water) to develop the core mechanics in. I also made an enemy object and a player object. The player object can now move around the room and cast the Water Jet spell to push the oblivious enemy object around. Here's a gif!

I'm going to keep working on the magic system for now. This includes the Ice Wall spell, the Water Walk spell, a magicka bar that regens over time and UI buttons to let you pick spells. (At the moment the image of the book is all I've got in terms of UI).

Hi! This is my second time doing a MFGJ (the last being Winter 2017, which was successful!) and I'm going to try making a roguelike with a focus on evading enemies rather than fighting them. This won't be a true roguelike because I probably won't have time to sort out procedurally generated levels within the time limit of the jam, but it's a potential stretch goal or something to work on after the jam is over. The only roguelike I've really played is Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup so that's a big influence. I also had a housemate who was obsessed with Crypt of the Necrodancer when I was at uni so that's something of an influence too. :P

Premise

The PC is a water mage returning to the ancient halls of their forebears where there is rumoured to exist the legendary Wellspring: an everflowing source of magic. However, it was abandoned when a ritual went wrong and unspeakable monsters overran the place. The water mages created guardians to stem the tide of creatures. Both guardians and monsters still inhabit the halls to this day.

Gameplay

The PC has to evade various enemies on their way to the bottom of the dungeon where the Wellspring lies. Various challenges they encounter will include:

• Monsters: I'd like to have a few different types of enemy. I'd like to include two at minimum: Stone Guardians, which can break through ice, doors and blocks after a couple of turns, and Spirit Guardians, which are incorporeal and can pass through doors and blocks but are affected more strongly by spells.
• Traps: when the water mages were fleeing they left behind various traps to slow down any creatures that might be following. These will manifest as various debuffs, such as Slow, Weakness (can't push blocks or close gates/doors) and Magicka Drain.
• Boss Fights/Levels??? This is something that would be neat to include but I haven't done much design work on yet and is pretty much just a stretch goal at this point.

However, the PC also has a number of things to help them:

• Magic: they have three spells that use various amounts of magicka, which regens slowly. Water Jet pushes enemies back a certain number of spaces. Ice Wall creates a temporary barrier between the PC and enemies. Water Walk lets them walk over areas of deep water for a limited time, which most monsters can't pass over or through. 
• Environment: there are gates and doors which the PC can use to block the path of pursuing enemies, as well as blocks they can push to the same effect. Enemies will also stop pursuit if the PC goes up or down a dungeon level.
• Loot! Treasure chests will contain temporary buffs such as Double Speed,  Map Reveal,  and Second Chance (if the PC gets caught by a monster, instead of an instant Game Over they are warped to a random location on that level and lose the buff).

A lot of these things aren't set in stone and may very well change as I playtest what I've got and get a feel for what works and what doesn't. Difficulty is something that I'm going to be thinking about a lot.

My plan is implement everything listed above, as well as a single handbuilt level and possibly a tutorial, then see what I can add or change to improve the game! 

Thank you! That would probably be a good thing to indicate in the tutorial, so I'll add it to the list of changes that need doing.

And it's submitted! Thanks to everyone who suggested stuff and gave their support!

Yeah, getting someone to play it was super useful! I'm not very well-versed in gifmaking but I'll try and show off the actual gameplay if I can. Seeing how the deadline is looming though it might just be easier to wait and play the game. :P

Day 13

Drew a background so the greenhouse bit of the title is more accurate now. Managed to implement a third plant, so in the last day I'm just hoping to make stuff look prettier.

If I have the time I'd like to make clouds drift by in the background. c:

Thank you! :D That's really encouraging! A tutorial really was sorely needed and has now been added to the game.

Day 11!

I'm still working on this, I just lost a few days from life happening and then didn't feel like I had enough for a devlog update.

New stuff:

• Mouse-over tooltips for the cuttings are back, so you actually know what you've got stored.
• The pot to plant proportions have been altered so they look better, and I took the opportunity to redraw the plants. They're still placeholders, but they're a bit less ugly now.

• Clicking on the pot will also select the plant! Seems like an obvious feature to have but I didn't realise it until somebody playtested my game and got confused when clicking on a pot with a plant in it did nothing.
• There is now a menu. The most favourable thing that can be said about it is that it's functional.

• I've also implemented a tutorial consisting of floating boxes that tell you to do things. My feelings about it are similar to those about the menu.

Possible future stuff in vague order of priority:

• At least one new plant, if not two. I'm pretty happy with everything else at the minute so I'd just like to make some more actual game content before the game jam ends.
• Draw more stuff: a greenhouse background so you're no longer just floating in a white void, art for the menu that's somewhat more representative of the game than a black void, prettier UI.
• A menu you can access from inside the game.
• Implementing drag and drop instead of just clicking on things because that seems more intuitive (and it would be a good thing to learn how to do).
• Helpful tooltips that tell you what stuff does.

Day 4!

Plants can now be bred with each other, in that tried and tested manner of shoving two cuttings together in the same pot. I am entirely sure that is how plant breeding works.

Several new features have also been introduced, including:

• Dispose All: clicking on this will automatically remove all plants in pots.
• Target: Creating the plant shown in the target window, clicking on said plant and clicking on the target window will not only unlock a new target, but also a new seed type!
• Related to the above: a new seed type! In addition to having a height variable, the new plant has a varying number of leaves: no leaves, some leaves and many leaves. Plants having leaves really helps with the whole 'looking like plants' thing. The new seed type will only produce tall or medium plants, and plants with some or many leaves. (Hence the target being short with no leaves.)
• Mouse-over tooltips to describe cutting variables briefly existed until the second plant was introduced, at which point it became one of many bug casualties. Looking to fix them soon.

• Menu
• Tutorial of some sort (the UI as it is isn't terribly self-explanatory)
• More plants with more variables!
• Story?
• Saving and loading?
• A larger cutting storage which cuttings can be moved into from the six-slot bar and vice versa? (Unsure if the game will ever really require it)
• General polish (redrawing art assets, messing around with scale, background, tweaking UI, etc.)

Day 2!

Not much was achieved today due to tiredness, but the plants can now be converted into cuttings and the cuttings will 'remember' the heights of the plants they were taken from. You can also now select up to two cuttings from the bar, but you can't actually do anything with them yet. That'll be the next step!

The floating numbers are the 'heights' of the plants and the cuttings, and basically just for my own reference so I could check everything was working as intended. They'll get removed before the game is released. (0 is short and 1 is medium! The first target plant will just be a tall version of the starting plant.)

Thank you! Hopefully I'll have polishing time left at the end so the plants can actually look like plants rather than green sticks. :P

Thanks! I hope so too!

Hi there! This is the Devlog for my game, The Alchemist's Greenhouse!

Engine

GameMaker Studio

Concept

You are the student of a renowned alchemist and potion-maker. At last, she's decided you're ready to start growing and breeding plants yourself and has given you your own greenhouse. Your job is to selectively breed plants from the stock seeds you've been provided, and grow the magical plants your mentor has described to you.

Gameplay

You have a greenhouse with plant pots and bags of seeds to plant in them. Each seed has randomly selected variables for each of its characteristics (e.g, height, size of leaves, number of fruits, etc.). You can take cuttings of plants and then combine two cuttings in an empty pot to create a new plant with some mix of the two 'parent' plants' characteristics. You're provided with target plants to create from your available seeds. There are some vague ideas for more complex features such as mutations, story, and doing alchemy with the target plants you create, but I'm going to ignore those until I've got the basic features implemented.

Day 1!

Today was spent putting together placeholder art and programming some of the very basic features, like planting seeds, having plants spawn with random heights, being able to select plants, and being able to discard plants to free up pots. Screenshot of how the game looks at the moment (middle plant selected):

The bar at the bottom is hopefully where the cuttings from plants will go, and the object to the right of that is the compost bin where plants get discarded. The mysterious floating object in the top left is the seed bag.

Tomorrow I'm looking to implement cuttings and hopefully then breeding!

Damnit. XD I wasn't sure, but my mental process was 'no, Oblivion must have been V because they could do the phase transition to have the V appear as part of the title!'... which is also true for IV. I'll go fix that.

Hey, I'm razorsharpsmile! I'm very new to coding and making video games but I've dabbled in various "creative" stuff over the years like drawing, creative writing, writing LARPs and GMing tabletop RP.

I've never done a game jam before but I'm very excited! :D I got the GameMaker Humble Bundle and that sparked my interest in trying my hand at making games. All I've done so far is a tutorial and the beginnings of a clicker game about bees, so I'm looking forward to attempting something a bit more advanced (and actually finishing something of my own).

My favourite games are probably ES III: Morrowind (and not ES IV), Dishonored, the Zero Escape series and Analogue: A Hate Story. I love exploration and world-building.