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Scorched devlog

A topic by Sparky9d created Aug 02, 2022 Views: 262 Replies: 10
Viewing posts 1 to 9

I've been on a bit of a weird schedule, but managed to get some progress done. 

The day before the jam started, I did some brainstoring in preparation; I thought I had a pretty good idea of what I wanted to make but then I saw the themes and got a much better idea. It's a platformer (I adore platformers), with hopefully a little aspect of metroidvania mixed in. Plants as Tools produced some interesting movement upgrades, and works well with Kill it with Fire to make a world scorched by fire (which is where the name comes from) with you as a plant trying to find a way out of the flames. 

The first thing I did was get the player movement sorted out. I originally wanted 8x8 sprites but halfway through tweaking the platforming code I realized 8x8 rooms weren't going to cut it (I wasn't going to have any camera movement aside from room transitions) so I redrew the player to 4x4, changed the movement code, and finally made a little 4x4 tileset to go with it. I've never working with such small sprites before, but making the tilesets is really fun and goes fast. Once the movement was done, I started on fire-spikes and checkpoints. I ran into a lot of problems with collision but it was mostly because I'm a little rusty with godot/also don't know precisely how some things work. Eventually I got it figured out, along with a (I think) satisfying little death/spawn animation for the player and another tileset.

I also planned out the rest of the stuff that I wanted to add, and started working on a couple more hazards that I'm keeping secret. I tried to keep the scope really small since I've been stuck in a cycle of starting and cancelling projects that are way too big, but there's a chance I won't be able to finish in time because there's also music, sfx and backgrounds to deal with. There's still a lot of time left though, so I'm not worrying yet. Progress so far:

Let me know what you think of the fire; I might have to redraw it.

Love the fire animation !
Good idea to have your base size smaller, but will make it challenging to draw everything.
But this way you'll have more freedom in your levels !
Great work eager to see what's next.

Thanks! Glad it looks like I won't have to redraw it; I used a kind of convoluted method requiring 3 AnimatedTexture resources to make the flames out of sync since I use a tilemap for them.

It is quite the challenge; I keep spending like 15 minutes on each 3- or 4-frame animation trying to figure out how to communicate what the thing is haha.

I'll do my best to keep the log up to date :)

Update #2:

Didn't get as much done today, but still made some progress. Somehow completely forgot about walljumping during original movement coding, so added that. Also finished hazards, so only a couple more "objects" left to make. Main thing I did though was the title, which though I was lazy and made it simple was a nice weight to get off my back. Last thing is another fun 4x4 background tileset.

Tomorrow, plannng on making the level loading + transition system, plus the title music which I'm both excited and scared for (I'm not very experienced at making music, but I know some theory and I try my best.) Then I'll be ready for the fun part – levels.


Love the transition animation !
Still impressed you're doing 4x4 tiles.
I wonder if the the brown pixel to show character direction isn't a bit hard to see ?

Thanks Darenn! 

Good catch, I'll see if I can make it a little more visible.

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Update #3

I have not done the title music yet, but I decided to wait because I want to redo the title screen. Shouldn't have rushed to get it done; I think it could be a lot better.

I did however implement a level-loading system and made the first 2 levels (mostly.) I tried first to make a far fancier system for level transitions but it didn't work out and I didn't want to spend a huge chunk of time faffing with it, so I settled for the very basic and technically drop-dead boring room switcher here. 

The game was really lacking in visual depth/interest which was fixed with a simple but (in my opinion) wonderful little lighting system that adds a lot to the feel of the environment. I know this kind of changes the theme a little bit but I think the off-track deviation is worth it for the result. This was completely unplanned and it took up quite a bit of my time to get it "polished" and working properly, however. Tomorrow we'll continue with the plan...

Oh, and as per Darenn's suggestion I added a flower to the player to denote facing direction more clearly.

Nice work !
Interesting to know you regret having rushed the title screen, thanks for sharing. Still a nice placeholder though, and maybe it did help you find what you really wanted.
The lights increases the cave/dark mood, I think it's great ! Don't worry about stretching the theme. The 10 themes are optional and are just here to give inspiration. For example one of the themes I liked was "The Sun Is Your Enemy" and I changed it into "The Sun Is You Ally" then "You are the Sun". :P
Keep it up !

(+1)

Thanks!

Yeah, I would not have thought of the new title design if I hadn't made this rushed one. I forgot that iteration is a huge part of making something, thank you for reminding me. I do really like the multiple themes because mixing them leads to so much potential, more so than the typical 1 limitation 1 optional theme. 

Mistakes were Made

So, this isn't really an update. More like a down-date. But I wanted to share my mistakes anyway.

Everything kind of fell apart a couple days ago. I was working on making a powerup that would be one of main movement mechanics. Work was going really slowly I think because I was tired from the week – but i'm not going to use excuses, I was doing a really sloppy job. When I got a semi-usable prototype working, I realized something very important: it wasn't a good movement mechanic. It wasn't fun, it was boring, and in addition it had some horrible bugs I had no clue how to fix. The other movement option I'd planned also now looked like a pain to code and I wasn't sure if It would be usable either. So I'd wasted a whole day and found out that I needed to seriously reconsider what the point of the game was. I'd also already made all the objects, which are centered around difficult platforming. I could theoretically turn it into a metroidvania/puzzle platformer, but I don't have a thought-out plan for that. The other option is try to think of and code a fun movement mechanic today, and rush to get all the levels and music and sfx done the rest of the week. I'm not sure how I managed to get so little done the first week considering the time I spent. There's also in reality only like 5 days left for me because I can't get much done on the weekends, aside from thinking and planning, which I did lots of the past 2 days. I never came to a decision as to what to do.

This is why you don't do art and objects first. I should have learned this lesson by now, but the first step should always be make a prototype of the core of the game and see if it's any good. Then add content, art, music. No matter how good ideas seem in your head they could actually be unusable. I hope you can take something helpful away from this.

...I guess I'll update tomorrow or the next day what happens. Hopefully I can get something done. Good luck to everyone on the final week!

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Update #4

We now have a movement mechanic!

I remembered this old idea I had but never got around to actually using in a full game. It's reversed and tweaked a bit here, but it's still based on the same idea. The original concept was that gravity was flipped 90° in the nonexistent Z direction to swap between a platformer and top-down game, but I decided I didn't like falling off the background walls and dying so I just made it so that you can grab onto walls. It's pretty fun to use, and I think it could make for some interesting level design. It also didn't give me a million bugs while I was coding it which was nice. Now that this is done I can go on to make levels... finally.