Hi, last time I joined Game Jam for the first time in my life.

Today I am going to show you the process of creating a game for this jam.

Day 1

The start of the first day was quiet as I waited about the jam, wrote myself a simple top view shooter prototype until eleven o'clock, then the jam topic was posted on light attraction bugs, that's what it sounded like.

I had two associations, the first is the interpretation of the theme that most people followed, i.e. light and bugs, and the second, a bit less template, that the lighting causes errors in the game. If I were to interpret this topic now, I would probably choose the first one, more template because it is simpler, but I decided to mix them up. I thought to myself that I would create a game where you use light to attract bugs that are game bugs (xd). I had absolutely no idea how I want to do it, but that day I had some errands to do so I went to do it and in the meantime I was trying to think of something.

Then I came up with the idea of a very large project. I wanted to create a game where you catch bugs from objects in the top view with a flashlight in the western city 9 a given time and then fight them in the side view. Don't ask me how I wanted to do it in 3 days after about a month of learning game development. Now I do not know. However, I started making a demo and it turned out that not only is the project too big, but also the gameplay is boring.

It was almost evening, and I had no idea, so, it was a very bad situation. In the end, fortunately, I came up with something. I remembered my mom once played a game of shooting a chickens or something like that. I also associated that chameleons eating bugs by catching them with my tongue combined that with the idea of in game bugs and bang, I had an idea whose main concept was for the chameleon to catch bugs on the monitor with its tongue and also you would have to avoid something on the screen.

So I started creating basic mechanics. Based on my prototype of the top down shooter that I created before the jam, I added movement, the possibility of shooting out the tongue and that was the first day...

It didn't look too good, I had practically nothing, and in addition, the last day (in my case, Sunday, because I couldn't work on Monday anymore), I only planned to pollish the game, and also i had addnicional problem becouse didn't know how to deploy the game on itch.io.

Day 2

From the beginning of that day, I knew it would be hard, I needed to create all the mechanics that are required for the game to work, i.e. ... randomization of the light position on the screen, light appearing, bugs appearing near light, screen errors appearing, screen error mechanics, score counting and difficulties in the form of flying time, and in addition I found out that moving with the arrows is very boring and irritating, so I had to rewrite them, which turned to be very difficult becouse of mixing 3d with 2d, so in total entire first day was wasted. Of course, I didn't think about doing a checklist, so there was a terrible chaos when creating these mechanics.

After a few hours of improving the controls, I moved on to writing basic mechanics. I started with light.

I created a simple prefab and added a script that randomizes the positions on the screen and changes the position of the light. The simplest and most important behind me. Then the bugs.

In order to easily demonstrate to you the level of difficulty of implementing the next mechanics, I will tell you how many scripts I needed, because when I had to implement the light I had 1 simple script responsible for drawing and changing positions, here I had 3, responsible for the appearance, movement and catching bugs, and 2 from these scripts were almost twice as long as the light script. Ok managed to do it somehow, now there are errors on the screen.

They were even harder to create than bugs. I figured it out so that there will be a warning on the screen and after some time a glitch, which if you hover it 3 times or hit, you will lose. Again, as in the light, I started with creating prefabs and... I absolutely did not know what to do next. Eventually, I broke it into two scripts and after many hours of work I finished creating the most important mechanics. The game wasn't great, but it was already a playable demo, so the fear that I wouldn't have time to do anything vanished.

Finally, I added a scoring system that allows you to score points for every bug that you catch. It was late in the night and I was so exhausted that on Saturday I stopped work and went to bed.

(I really would like to show you what the gameplay was like after day two, but I didn't think about making backups or any screenshots at that time, so all I can show you is the prefab screens that were ready that day.)

Day 3

Still it wasn't very good. I didn't do everything I wanted to do, and I need to spend a lot of time adding graphics, sound, making a webGL build and uploading the game to itch.io so I went to work right after waking up. The only kind of graphics I can create for games is pixel art, but that doesn't bother me too much as I love pixel art games. To break away from coding a bit, I started by creating a bug sprite and after it was finished, I added the last missing mechanic, i.e. a difficulty in the form of flying time.

It looked a little better now, I had to add the title screen, game over screen and something I hoped would save a fairly weak gameplay, which is the initial fun cutscene.

I started with the art of the "play" button and the "play agin" button and then went on to the most important thing that was still to be done, game over screen, so I centered the frame, added game over and restart text and boom ready. Honestly, I thought it would be a lot harder. Ok never mind time for the title screen. I added a play button and boom ready ... wow making a menu is easy.

Ok, I wanted on the title screen and game over screen to place a chameleon, to know what the game is about, of course I had no idea how to draw a chameleon, so by  I created a few stains on piskelapp.com until I finally created the shape which pleased me, I added some colors and it worked, even a cute chameleon came out of it. To make a sprite for game over screen, I reduced it a bit and changed the position of the paws and I already had two solid pixel art, put them in their places and it turned out that I have an big responsiveness problem, but I did not have time to fix it, because it is already quite a lot part of the day flew by and I had to add a cutscene.

The idea was that game studio staff complain that their game has too many bugs, and their boss says no problem and shows them a chameleon. There was not even a shadow of a chance that I would happen to make employee sprites, but I had to draw at least 3 things, comic-like clouds showing what the characters say, the words "Game Studio" so that we would know where the action is going and the next chameleon sprite with this time looking more stupid and which is held by someone. Drawing the first two wasn't much of a problem, and the only difficulty in the last one was drawing a chameleon from the front and making it look even more stupid, but luckily it worked.

Initially, I planned to do this scene in c # scripts, but doing the animation in unity turned out to be much easier.

I animated the cutscene to the end and it was already the time when I was going to put the game on itch.io, but I found that the game still needed sounds and particles and that I would only be sitting late at night if I didn't make it.

I turned on the lmms program and somehow I made bug-catching and button-clicking sounds, but I implemented only first one for the final game.

It's time for music. I am weak artist but I am an even worse composer, and I had very little time so I put together some interesting sounds and even a nice rhythm came out, but I stopped there, because there is no option that I would finish all the music, taking into account the fact that my time was running out and I had to add it to the game and implement the particle to make the game a little more interesting.

I added music and sounds to the game, I created a bug-catching particle quickly, looked at the hour and ... It was very late, and I don't even know how to do a webGl build, well, it wasn't good.

Fortunately, I installed webgl before the jam, and the build itself was not difficult and thanks to this tutorial I did it relatively quickly.

After the jam

I'm really glad to have even finished this game.

Since this is my first Jam, I'm not going to make big changes to the game to have a nice souvenir.

After jam was over, I played and rated every game I could, some were really funny. My result looked like this:

and I think that for the first jam where there were 76 games, I was ok. I learned a lot.

If I had to give you one golden thought it would be to not try to force, during a short jam, do a few mediocre mechanics but focus on one good one.

I plan to make a video version of this devlog in the future. When it will be ready, I'll link it here.

I hope you liked it. See you and have a nice day.