JamCraft 5 Dev Diaries

Day 1 (10/04)

With the themes ALIEN and EXPIRE announced, I decided to make the sequel to my 2017 game, Artorm Fighter. Initial character movement was made before a change was made to smoothen the movement. Image angle is now affected by the vertical speed of the ship and shooting lasers is possible but currently serves no purpose. No final art will be placed until the game is closer towards its completion.

Day 2 (11/04)

Today I really wanted to make an object to target. I focused on creating the asteroids with varying sizes, speed and rotation. The bullet also now has an adjustable damage value and a temporary background was added. The game’s resource/currency, lithidium, was added with a random chance to drop for each asteroid destroyed. Amounts are stored but not displayed in-game yet.

Day 3 (12/04)

Work on the overworld had commenced with two game rooms finally linking together, although there’s no room transition for now. A description of each of the three destinations was added, although only 2 work for now with the space station being an open destination. A late decision to increase difficulty, based on feedback from the original released in 2016, lead to health been removed for fuel – the game now operates on a one hit KO system. A 3D render was made of the ship for future reference as well as to use pre-rendered wireframes in the space station room.

Day 4 (13/04)

The game control object, which determines what’s to be created in each room, is now persistent and so every room is now related – fuel levels, lithidium, scores and upgrades can now be stored in the game control object. Settings for the upgrades have been made and the player is now able to modify the ship’s stats using lithidium. Refuelling at the station has been implemented.

Day 5 (14/04)

Big day regarding the game’s development progress. With a lot of maths, the 13-minute story mission timeline was generated along with its scripts and randomly generated waves. In addition to that, the waves individually become progressively more difficult. All 5 enemy variants were made including a boss with individual behaviours. I think I spent 11 hours working on the game today.

Day 6 (15/04)

Much time was spent on connecting all the rooms before moving onto the opening cinematic. There was a huge graphical bug with the HTML5 build which went unnoticed (as testing is done on the Windows build). The error was identified, the culprit being a character not included within the asset indexes, and quickly rectified. After the intro, the player is now able to type their bounty name which is to be used for the online high-scoring system. I have doubts that I will have this feature ready for launch. A bit of the final artwork was done even though the game is probably 90% complete. I’m beginning to frequently feel unwell.

Day 7 (16/04)

Room transitions and cutscenes have been implemented with final artwork fitting them. All rooms have been linked and completed to publishing/release quality. Clouds have been added to the main mission after wave 2 and the player is able to abort the mission with a screen transition. The title screen has been added and the splash image is on the way! Tomorrow’s focus will be on background music and sound effects. Online highscores and virtual keys (for mobile players) can’t be included within the game before the deadline and they will be released as an update, at which point the game will be published on other HTML5 gaming sites and not just itch.

Day 8 (17/04)

Today I felt very unwell and could not get myself out of bed. I decided to spend the day away from working on the game.

Day 9 (18/04)

Still feeling unwell, I decided it was best to release the unfinished game to enter the competition, but the final build will be ready in a week’s time (with sound, virtual keys, online highscores and such).