The Week Of Awesome II

This month I have decided to participate in the GameDev.net’s ‘The Week of Awesome II‘. This is a game development competition (game jam). I decided to create this post to state that I will be participating in this competition. I will be writing about my progress during the competition on my journal on GameDev.net. This blog post will also serve as my development log to make it easier for people to follow my progress. Everything what I talk about on my journal will also be updated on here.

Development Log
Tuesday September 16 2014
Welcome to my first journal entry.

This journal entry is stating that I am in for ‘The Week of Awesome II’ community challenge. I will most likely use the following during the challenge:

• Language: GML
• SDK/Engine: GameMaker Studio
• Hosting: On itch.io or my website
• Sound: BFXR
• Music: Either try to create my own using PixiTracker (unlikely) or try and find free ones on the net

I guess that is it for this entry. Good luck to everybody else who will be entering.

Monday September 22 2014
Today was the start of The Week of Awesome II. The theme for this game jam was ‘The toys are alive!’. I believe this must be the first game jam where I had a solid idea in the first 30 minutes.

The basic idea of the game I am trying to make is that aliens have stolen your toys. You (you play as a magical toy, I guess) must chase after the aliens in your spaceship. However, there is a problem. The spaceship is too big, which makes it difficult to control by one toy. All the other toys are scared to come with you. Now it is up to you to pilot the spaceship to fly through and avoid space debris, use your guns to shoot the aliens and use your grapple hook to reel in the toys. Each aspect of the spaceship is in a different room so you must move from room to room to control different parts of the spaceship.

I know this idea might not make much sense so here is the elevator pitch: ‘A SHMUP game where the player has to move around its own spaceship to fly, shoot and grapple the toys from aliens’. Maybe that increased your excitement for the game by 1%. If not, then you can gaze at the improvement on my pixel art below. Next update should be tomorrow.

Tuesday September 23 2014
I got my core gameplay implemented today. If my description of the game I am trying to make did not make much sense to you yesterday, then look at the gif. It shows the player navigating to the grapple hook/magnet and using it to retrieve the stolen teddy bear. The player can also maneuver the ship left and right and shoot the guns to destroy the enemies (alien toys?) but has to move to the correct section of the ship first.

Saturday September 27 2014

First, let me start by telling you what I did on day three, four and five. I did nothing. Well that is a little bit harsh. I probably did around an hour’s amount of work. Most of this was spend researching on what art style to go for the game. I was expecting to do more work than this but work held me up longer than I anticipated. So today, I spend my time completing Toys In Space without adding any additional features.

The first thing I did today was complete the art design. I then designed the GUI layout for the game on paper and then implemented it in the game. Looking at the code now makes me cringe because I know I could have made it much more efficient. However, since my game is still running without any frame drops now, I am going to leave it as it is for now. The last thing I did today add in the background art, sound effects and music. All the sound effects I used are from BFXR and the music is from nosoapradio. It feels much more like a complete game now.

I wanted to have the game complete by today so I could have asked people to test it out for me. Sadly, this did not happen. I hope that I will have the game completed for tomorrow morning and get some people to test it for me.

I personally like the art design I went with. The game only uses two colors so it made it easier for me to design the sprites. I wanted to have an online leaderboard for the game but I don’t think I will have time to implement that since I will be busy most day tomorrow as well. I am also concerned that people might not understand on how to play the game. The best thing I can do for this is record some gameplay footage.

I will only have a few hours tomorrow morning to test and finish the game. Wish me luck!

Sunday September 28 2014

I spend the few hours I had this morning on tidying up little aspects of the game, such as adding a volume button and trying my best to rewrite the help file. I decided to make a gameplay video of the game since I was 99% sure people will not understand my “brilliant” help file.

Overall, I am very pleased on how the game turned out. The only thing I am not happy with is that I did not have time to implement an online leaderboard system, as that would have made the game more fun and competitive.

You can click here to download the game.