Improve my Game Jam Devlog

Ethan

Introduction

We started this project on January 5th for the 32 bit game jam.  Our game didn't turn out to be in the 32 bit style, but we still made a lot of progress towards making a pixel platformer collectathon gam.

Progress During the Jam

This week I focused on improving atmosphere and environment. I learned a lot about tilesets and their different uses. My favorite use for tile-sets was combining animation and tile-mapping to create small living details in the environment. An example of this are the hanging vines in the cave. Tile-mapping made it easy to draw the vines so they can be different lengths and still connect to the ceiling. One of the tiles in the set also has horizontal animations frames, so the ends of the vines bounce subtly on a loop. This is a very basic application of animated tile-maps, and I can imagine countless uses that will add life to our game.

What to improve in the future

The main thing I want to work on in the coming weeks is story. We have a story planned out, I just need to circle back to NPC animations, creating their environment, and adding a few UI things to make npc interactions look nice.

I would also like to improve my asset creation workflow. During the jam I worked on creating flower patches that go with the flowers the player collects (you may notice I made it through about 5 or 6 of them before falling off). My approach was brute-force, hand animating the flower patch for each flower in the patch. This required moving each individual up and down in aseprite, making sure that there was a shadow on the stem for each frame, and bouncing the sprite sheet and adding it to the game manually. Any time I am doing such a repetitive task, I feel like there is a more efficient way. I'm always hesitant to make systems for my art that might detract from the hand placed detail. I want the art to feel intentional and careful with every pixel. That being said, I calculated the time it takes to implement my flower patches and it doesn't seem reasonable at all.

30 unique flowers, 1 custom flower patch per flower, about 25 minutes of animation time and 10 minutes of implementation (including particle effects). 35min x 30min  = 17.5 hours. Working only a few hours a day I could spend weeks getting this done. Plus, if we ever wanted to add more flowers to the game, I would spend 35 minutes on each one. If we wanted hundreds of flowers I would never be able to finish with my current method. Anyway, I'm hoping to make a system to speed up this process, and then on a case by case basis decide if a certain flower needs a handmade touch. 

Our current game world showcases a bunch of mechanics Michael put together for the game. We are also looking at ways to improve our level design and difficulty progression. 

Conclusion

Overall, I feel like I learned a lot about efficiency this week. Cryingames has existed for several years, and during that time my art style has improved, but never changed significantly. I think its time to start creating my art more systematically to improve my output. 

Michael

I didn't work too much during this jam. I was taking a break from making all the core mechanics of the game for the 32 Bit Jam earlier this month. I showed Ethan how to do a couple of things with the script and then he did his thing. I came back at the end to help make the build and tweak a couple aspects of the gameplay. Mainly how icy everything was, I added more friction on the ground and more control in the air for The Keeper but not The Little guy (I want there to be two distinct feels for each character). I fixed a couple small bugs regarding the audio that Ethan added. And I also updated the game page to better advertise that it is a puzzle platformer.