Game Off 2019 Day 27 to 31
Day 27
I was hoping to do some work on Bee Flat, but I was over at my dad's helping him prepare the Thanksgiving Turkey. I had brought over my laptop, but my Atom text editor was on the fritz. It thinks I need to Publish my source code, but I cloned it from the GitHub repo using Git for Windows. I've been trying to do a fresh install on the program, but the installer just puts Atom files wherever it wants to without telling me.
Thankfully, Jedulz is on it with the commits! He added a building for the player to leap off of, made the player character look like a ninja, and the player character can launch off of the building. He said the way the player character looks is only temporary, but I'm down to keep the character looking like that if we run out of time. He also made a private Trello Board to keep track of what we need to do to finish the game. Jedulz, you're awesome!
Day 28
I was too busy stuffing my face full of turkey to work on Bee Flat. I don't feel too bad, because I think Jedulz was also too busy with Thanksgiving as well: neither one of us created commits for the game that day.
Day 29
Jedulz added a cool shop to the game: after the character lands, they enter a shop where they can buy upgrades. The only upgrade you can pick is to increase the launch speed, but it does decrease the player's score when they buy it.
Too bad I can't test it right now. It's the holidays and the family wants to go see the tree lighting downtown. Alright, I'll just have to work on it tomorrow. I feel bad that Jedulz has been doing most of the work for the game. I need to start pulling my weight here!
Day 30
Alright, I've found a little time to work on it. I found that the shop had a little bug: it allows you to buy more upgrades than what you can afford. I changed the button to only add the upgrade and deduct the points when the player can afford it.
I wanted to implement a skill based challenge to the game, so I thought about the glider. I designed it so that the fall acceleration would be decreased when you deployed it, but if you had upward velocity, it would cut it down to zero. That way, if the player wanted to get the most out of their leap, they would have to deploy the glider at the peak of their leap. I had to fix the way gravity worked in the game: Jedulz had implemented a timeout to change the upward velocity into a downward velocity of the same magnitude. I changed it so that the world had a "gravity" variable and on each draw, it would decrease the player's upward velocity into a downward velocity. I had to tweak the variables a bit, but I found that a value of 0.05 did the trick. It matched Jedulz's original arc, but this was smoother and I could manipulate how that value could affect the player: fully when launched or reduced when gliding.
The glider was drawn using HTML Canvas' closePath function. It allows you to draw weird shapes using vectors. I used it because I wanted it to fit the current "art style" of the game. I filled it with green because the building was already blue. Plus, it stands out against everything else in the game.
Day 31
I had worked into the morning adding an upgrade to the shop: upgrade glider. It increases the amount that the glider resists the force of gravity. I also made sure that the player can't buy over 90% resistance. If the player could buy 100%, then they wouldn't fall. If they could buy more than that, then they would fly upwards instead of falling.
I went to bed after I pushed that, but that's when Jedulz started making commits again. He added obstacles: the giant bees! When the player hits these bees, the player falls to the ground. Plus, they help avoid the awkward question: "why does this game have so many bee puns, but no bees in the actual game?"
He also put in sound effects using a JavaScript audio object to play sounds from sfxr. I think sfxr is found here. He also added background music using the same technique.
By the time I woke up, went to church, and returned; I had only about two hours left until submissions closed. I quickly added a "tutorial" for Users on their first run to say "touch or press any key to launch" or "touch or press any key to glide" so they know how to play the game. It then disappears after their first launch.
To submit the game to the game jam, I had to upload the project to itch.io. So, itch.io wants their uploads to have 3 to 5 screen shots (optional, but I felt it would help it look like a professional project), a cover image, and the zip file of the code. The zip was easy to get: I could just download it from GitHub. I took three screen shots of the game: the start screen, the shop, and one actual run. The tricky part was designing the cover image.
I found this really cool Retro Wave Text Generator, and I used it to display the game's title. I then threw it into GIMP image editor, and cropped it to the recommended 630x500 px. I then added a layer for each character, used the select tool to draw the shapes, and then I used the Rotate Tool to make the characters look like they're flying towards the title. If you're using GIMP and try to use the Rotate Tool, make sure you go back to the select tool and click any blank space to anchor that "rotate effect" to your selected layer. Here's what I created in GIMP:
I managed to upload the game, set the description, make the project public, and submit it to the game jam 11 seconds before it closed submissions. Here's the link to vote on Bee Flat, and here's the link to just play Bee Flat on itch.io. I had to use the embedded player with a set dimensions, because the game was not liking itch.io's full screen option. I'll have to look into that later.
Thank you for reading about my journey with the Game Off game jam. I hope that there's another game jam in the future. Hopefully, one that doesn't take place during the holidays that people do stuff. I'm going to take a little break for now. I'll probably play and rate some of the other submissions. Also, to learn Blender and Godot some more before I decide to use it again in another game jam!
I was hoping to do some work on Bee Flat, but I was over at my dad's helping him prepare the Thanksgiving Turkey. I had brought over my laptop, but my Atom text editor was on the fritz. It thinks I need to Publish my source code, but I cloned it from the GitHub repo using Git for Windows. I've been trying to do a fresh install on the program, but the installer just puts Atom files wherever it wants to without telling me.
Thankfully, Jedulz is on it with the commits! He added a building for the player to leap off of, made the player character look like a ninja, and the player character can launch off of the building. He said the way the player character looks is only temporary, but I'm down to keep the character looking like that if we run out of time. He also made a private Trello Board to keep track of what we need to do to finish the game. Jedulz, you're awesome!
Day 28
I was too busy stuffing my face full of turkey to work on Bee Flat. I don't feel too bad, because I think Jedulz was also too busy with Thanksgiving as well: neither one of us created commits for the game that day.
Day 29
Jedulz added a cool shop to the game: after the character lands, they enter a shop where they can buy upgrades. The only upgrade you can pick is to increase the launch speed, but it does decrease the player's score when they buy it.
Too bad I can't test it right now. It's the holidays and the family wants to go see the tree lighting downtown. Alright, I'll just have to work on it tomorrow. I feel bad that Jedulz has been doing most of the work for the game. I need to start pulling my weight here!
Day 30
Alright, I've found a little time to work on it. I found that the shop had a little bug: it allows you to buy more upgrades than what you can afford. I changed the button to only add the upgrade and deduct the points when the player can afford it.
I wanted to implement a skill based challenge to the game, so I thought about the glider. I designed it so that the fall acceleration would be decreased when you deployed it, but if you had upward velocity, it would cut it down to zero. That way, if the player wanted to get the most out of their leap, they would have to deploy the glider at the peak of their leap. I had to fix the way gravity worked in the game: Jedulz had implemented a timeout to change the upward velocity into a downward velocity of the same magnitude. I changed it so that the world had a "gravity" variable and on each draw, it would decrease the player's upward velocity into a downward velocity. I had to tweak the variables a bit, but I found that a value of 0.05 did the trick. It matched Jedulz's original arc, but this was smoother and I could manipulate how that value could affect the player: fully when launched or reduced when gliding.
The glider was drawn using HTML Canvas' closePath function. It allows you to draw weird shapes using vectors. I used it because I wanted it to fit the current "art style" of the game. I filled it with green because the building was already blue. Plus, it stands out against everything else in the game.
Day 31
I had worked into the morning adding an upgrade to the shop: upgrade glider. It increases the amount that the glider resists the force of gravity. I also made sure that the player can't buy over 90% resistance. If the player could buy 100%, then they wouldn't fall. If they could buy more than that, then they would fly upwards instead of falling.
I went to bed after I pushed that, but that's when Jedulz started making commits again. He added obstacles: the giant bees! When the player hits these bees, the player falls to the ground. Plus, they help avoid the awkward question: "why does this game have so many bee puns, but no bees in the actual game?"
He also put in sound effects using a JavaScript audio object to play sounds from sfxr. I think sfxr is found here. He also added background music using the same technique.
By the time I woke up, went to church, and returned; I had only about two hours left until submissions closed. I quickly added a "tutorial" for Users on their first run to say "touch or press any key to launch" or "touch or press any key to glide" so they know how to play the game. It then disappears after their first launch.
To submit the game to the game jam, I had to upload the project to itch.io. So, itch.io wants their uploads to have 3 to 5 screen shots (optional, but I felt it would help it look like a professional project), a cover image, and the zip file of the code. The zip was easy to get: I could just download it from GitHub. I took three screen shots of the game: the start screen, the shop, and one actual run. The tricky part was designing the cover image.
I found this really cool Retro Wave Text Generator, and I used it to display the game's title. I then threw it into GIMP image editor, and cropped it to the recommended 630x500 px. I then added a layer for each character, used the select tool to draw the shapes, and then I used the Rotate Tool to make the characters look like they're flying towards the title. If you're using GIMP and try to use the Rotate Tool, make sure you go back to the select tool and click any blank space to anchor that "rotate effect" to your selected layer. Here's what I created in GIMP:
Thank you for reading about my journey with the Game Off game jam. I hope that there's another game jam in the future. Hopefully, one that doesn't take place during the holidays that people do stuff. I'm going to take a little break for now. I'll probably play and rate some of the other submissions. Also, to learn Blender and Godot some more before I decide to use it again in another game jam!
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