Day 1: 6/17
First, lemme introduce myself. I'm minefracture. This is the first Jam I've joined, and I'm really excited for this. I don't have that much gamedev or pixel art knowledge under my belt, but I can't wait to learn more.
The theme for the Jam is "You are the Monster," so thought that I would try and do something where you have to chase and catch a simple AI character. I've never done AI enemies before, so this will be a new experience for me. But hey, that's what this Jam is all about, right?
The story of the game is that you play as a goblin, who is tasked with keeping the gold in the dungeon safe. However, an adventurer breaks in and starts stealing the gold. Afraid you're going to be fired, you chase the adventurer down in an attempt to catch him and return the gold to storage. Thanks to your intimate knowledge of the dungeon's many traps and hidden passageways, you should be able to catch up, right?
I know it's probably not "Monster" in the sense that the theme implied, but I didn't want to go with anything TOO dark.
I already had a simple platformer character going, so I thought I would use that to get a jump-start on the project.
Welcome to the world, little box!
There are a couple of issues with the character controller script, so the first thing I'm gonna do is iron them out and start work on the first level. I plan on chases to take place on horizontal levels, but I'm not quite sure at this point whether I'm gonna use a tilemap or manually-placed platforms. I guess this is gonna be a prototype level.
Day 2: 6/18
I finished up with the prototype level, and I think it's pretty fun to run through. I also made a simple script to attach to dangerous objects that will destroy other objects. I plan on having levels with crates and things that the player or runner will push around, and those crates, as well as the player, will get destroyed by traps.
With the character controller bugs ironed out and a first level built, here comes the meat and potatoes of the game: the runner. Like I said yesterday, I've never coded an enemy of any sort before, even something simple like a Goomba, so this is my "big thing" I'm learning, if you understand what I mean.
After a brief brainstorming session (Shoutout to MooNiZZ!) I figured out how the enemy runner's movement is going to work. Basically how it's going to work is the runner will use a BoxCast2D to check if there's ground ahead of it, and if there is, it'll jump. For sections where a jump is still needed despite there not being a pit, I'll put a trigger there to activate a jump "manually." First came the pit jumps, and this is what took me the longest so far.
Friends Blue, Green, Gray, and Mousie go for an adventure together
Now, you might be able to see from the GIF, but neither of the characters seem to like slopes. That's okay, because I'm going to do a tiled approach to level design when it comes to that point. I should also note that I made a couple of public functions for the runner. I'll be calling these from the trigger objects to force a jump without a platform edge and to make the green character turn around.
I wasn't able to get it fully working tonight, I ran into some odd behavior. It's getting late though, so I'll iron the bug(s) out tomorrow.
Day 3: 6/19
I finished up with the prototype level, and I think it's pretty fun to run through. I also made a simple script to attach to dangerous objects that will destroy other objects. I plan on having levels with crates and things that the player or runner will push around, and those crates, as well as the player, will get destroyed by traps.
With the character controller bugs ironed out and a first level built, here comes the meat and potatoes of the game: the runner. Like I said yesterday, I've never coded an enemy of any sort before, even something simple like a Goomba, so this is my "big thing" I'm learning, if you understand what I mean.
After a brief brainstorming session (Shoutout to MooNiZZ!) I figured out how the enemy runner's movement is going to work. Basically how it's going to work is the runner will use a BoxCast2D to check if there's ground ahead of it, and if there is, it'll jump. For sections where a jump is still needed despite there not being a pit, I'll put a trigger there to activate a jump "manually." First came the pit jumps, and this is what took me the longest so far.
I eventually got it set up after a couple of hours of debug work, but once I got it working I was too tired to work on anything else. Hopefully tomorrow I can start on other stuff.
Day 4: 6/20
Today, I'm planning on focusing on fleshing out the rest of the mechanics, and adding a win and lose condition. The lose conditions will be the player falling into a trap or the adventurer reaching the exit, and the win conditions will be the adventurer falling into a trap or the player catching him.
I had already created a RunnerGoal script that I was using as a glorified tag, so I decided to expand that script with actual behavior. But first, I created a GameManager object to handle scene changes for the win/lose conditions.
After I got it set up with temporary debug statements, I started work on the tileset. I plan on having one "main" tile, with a couple of others for decoration and the like. After about half an hour, I ended up with this. I actually had trouble
Looks pretty awful on the website. Huh. Not quite sure how to fix it.
You probably can't tell from the image there, but there are two blocks with cracks on them, these will be used to mark secret passages that the player can use to take a shortcut and catch up to the adventurer easier.
Day 5: 6/21
Today's work will pretty much only be art and level design. I don't really have anything much to show today but I'll have quite a bit for tomorrow.
Day 6-8: 6/22-6/24
I took a break, i felt really burnt out on the jam.
Day 9: 6/25
After a break, I decided not to do too much more work on the game, and just finish it up by adding music, a menu, and game over screens. At this point, I really don't want to work much more on this game. I think the reasoning behind it is just that I don't actually like the idea behind my game that much.
​
After adding the things I wanted to add, I chose to upload the game to itch.io and kinda be done with it. I did have fun over the first few days, but I eventually lost interest in the game. Thanks, Captain Coder!