Hey everyone, long time no see, been busy with various things but always working on the site in case you wonder. But anyways what's this page? Fuck yeah today starts the 2024 Game Maker's Toolkit Game Jam and here I'll document my thoguhts and feelings on it starting at 2pm my time today and ending at 2pm on tuesday. This one is very important because this very annual jam is how I met topper, and this might be the last year in a while that we get to do one of these together. Really cool thing about this year is that we get 96 hours instead of only 48, which means more time for better planning and polishing and also topper gets to sleep lol.

One thing that we are now more aware than ever to keep in mind is that we need to K E E P T H I N G S S I M P L E unlike other years where we had a big scope and tried to invent something new and creative and ended up without a playable project. I also will be trying to throw my hat in the ring at coding probably so that I'm not just making sprites and giving topper ideas on more shit he has to do.
But anyway yeah! I'll b back here in about 5 hours when the theme is announced.

Fuck yeah Moon Crusher let's gooo

Theme dropped! Annnd...! "Built to scale" Oh my god I think this is the worse one so far. oh shit I forgot to upload this to the site...

Well we got some ideas brewing and for now we might go with a continous platformer where you get to build your obstacles and it all takes place in a tiny scale.

will post more updates when we get more things done, but expect ants and tiny things aroudn here.

It's been 20 hours and what do we have?

Well we didn't come up with many ideas I wonder why Mr Mark Brown but from the couple we had, one interpretation that seemed to work is this:
A game about scaling. You're scaling something like a mountain or something, and there are obstacles. As you scale it you have to choose and place obstacles on your way so there's a BUILD element Topper's idea I didn't even think of the build part, only thinking of scale
It's good enough and it seems simple, all systems are things we have worked on before though separately, it's a platformer, so I think in terms of scope this is the best we've had since hell escaper.
The first day was just for idea brewing, topper will be doing most of the code and I'll do the visuals so I started sketching something yesterday and I'm following it rn in the morning.

Made a basic draft of an ant, we decided you'll be an ant scaling a tree.
This one looks okay, still didn't decide exactly what kind of style I would aim for but it's an alright base for reworks.

After taking a closer look at a real ant mainly bc I think it's cool when things look somewhat realistic, I made a skeleton of the ant's structure, this will make things easier for animating.

After that I made a more polished draft, choosing some better colours so the ant doesn't look like a smudge on your screen because of the legs.
I really like the result but there's one issue, I made the ant a red-ish brown... The same colour I'd use for a tree. So going forward I'd have to keep in mind that you need to contrast with the background.

Another idea I had a bit ago was "What if you're a robot ant, so you were built to scale" or something like that, either way, I think the bluish gray is a good contrast to what will potentially be the background. I'm still waiting on topper's opinion on the robot ant change, idk how aweake he is yet but I think next I'll try to raise the body a bit, so it's not as hidden by the legs.

Well here's the animation of the ant walking, not super sure how I feel about it but maybe when it has the skin over it'll look better. We decided in a carpenter ant, because you build to scale. Got a headache rn and OH YEA NO WIFI BTW idk wtf happened but our wifi will just not connect and I'm using data, no chance I program this game today fellas.

Made another version, this one was based on a carpenter ant, also gave it the required equipment for its required tasks. Struggled a bit when trying to make the legs not cover the body and stand out.

This one I did a recolour to make it pop from the background and add an outline for the same reason, I'm really happy how it turned out and will soon make the animation for it.

Took a break from the ant to make the rest of the game's assets so I thoguht about and made some platforms that you'll build as you play, each with a different mechanic and a cost, safer one will be costlier and so on.

Only 2 words, fuck yeah.

Aigh things seem to be going alright with topper, he got movement working and now's working on the platform shop. We also got the ides more equated between us two because there has been some small confusion but things are going very smoothly. I made the shop and tweaked the platform colours, next I should try my hand at the background stuff, tree and stuff behind for paralax. Wish me luck because it's my first time doing that.

After some tinkering and looking up a bit on inspiration, I'm basing myself on tadpole tap and webbed, I came out with this trunk sprite, it can be loopable infinitely so it should work fine. Then I moved on to the background, which honestly it's the part I have almost no experience with, animation is hard but backgrounds were so new to me. I looked at some examples again to get a grasp on what I should aim for, and mainly what I got was a very basic background, pretty much just colors, and they're "tainted with atmosphere" the further away they are, so going more towards whiteish blues. I think it turned out pretty good but it did take me a while.

We decided to add 2 more platforms, one for wall jumping You would be able to rotate platforms by 90° but we ended up scratching that and another one with spikes at the bottom, which became my least favorite and most favorite platform sprite respectively.

That's about where monday ended, topper spent the whole night up coding so that everything would be in working condition by the morning and that's exactly what he did. He posted the game to itch and left for me to style and edit the page, so all left for me to do was add a cover image.

Which turned out alright, I wasn't sure exactly how to do the ant at the bottom, but I did the title in a way I'm content with, either way it's not as important as the rest of the game, but I think it does have some worth.

After having played it for the past 2 days I have to say, I am happy that I got to be part of this project because it turned out so fun! Granted the game is VERY hard, excruciatingly so, and that's solely a case of little playtesting and dev bias since after the game was working topper sent the build and had to pack his things and get in a car, but I honestly loved playing it even if it's super punishing. The graphics turned out pretty good, nick did a nice job on the soundtrack and the sound effects, there are pretty much no bugs besides the ant, haha get it guys I'm so clever and once you get used to how the controls work and the platform's behaviour, shit can be fun, it's an awesome time waster imo.

This last section is on things I plan to improve on the game. Regardless on the fact they will not contribute to the game jam I honestly care more about the game itself than our classification. It is fun to play but no ammount of skill can get you past a certain point. So here's a little list of fixes I plan to add on it As soon as topper sends me the game porject, I swear to god all I wanna do is tinker on some values I have no idea why he hasn't yet

Make all coins worth 10, and much more frequent
You need coins to buy the platforms and there are soooo few coins, specially since almost all of them are worth either 1 or 3 which is not enough for you to reach the next coin, so you mainly have to rely on the 20 coins you start with and your ability to use cheaper platforms.

Have no repeat buying options
That shouldn't be hard to implement, having 2 or 3 of the same option just sucks and rids the player of freedom.

Adjust player movement
Mainly just reduce horizontal speed when walking, that ant fucking dashes along the screen and it's hard for platforming, it just doesn't feel right.

Add a controls screen
That's on me mainly, I didn't have a controls graphic ready before I had to go to bed on monday I have work to go to and class at the end of the day, I can't just run on -2 hours of sleep but I made one today and it looks pretty nice.

There'll be more stuff later when I get to these but these are the main ones that are more urgent, I really want them fixed because I want to be able to just play the game in the way it was intended, and I think it would just be more fun like this.