Little Shield - My first game jam entry!

So this week, I participated in the third annual Blackthornprod Game Jam. It was the first jam I ever participated, and also the first game i finished. It was quite fun to make a game in a short time, you should try one if you haven't!

Oh kay, onto the devlog. I used to be somewhat scared of game jams. I was worried if i couldn't make a good game in time for the deadline, among other things. However, I decided to participate in one. Here is how it went:

Saturday

The theme was announced: Less is More. Saturday was brainstorming day. I came up with 2 ideas: a bullet hell with a wave system in which you would get coins for defeating enemies, however coins would make you bigger and slower, making it harder to dodge things and survive; and a The Legend of Zelda-like adventure in which your only form of defending and attacking would be a shield. I'm actually happy that i took the second idea, as it looked way less complicated than the first one. I opened up a Construct 2 project, made a character, added the movement script and that's it. I didn't really do much that day other than thinking of good ideas, which honestly didn't take much time.

Sunday

Sunday was the first day i made good progress on my game. I created the enemies and the script for shooting, but how would i make the shield reflect stuff? I ended up finding a tutorial on Construct's "Bullet" behaviour. The tutorial helped me a lot, and alllowed me to make the shield. I made a test level and added more enemies to try to fix some bugs. That was basically it for the day, and i was very happy about it.

Monday

I don't remember much of monday, other than the fact that i did not do almost anything on the project.

Tuesday

Tuesday was a great day. I made two other enemy types, built the levels, tried to fix the buggy mess that was the spiky enemy.. all around i did something great. I also got my sister to playtest the game, and she really liked it. I implemented the enemy kill counter (That is not in the final game) and added keys to open the dungeon. And started making the boss.

Wednesday

This day taught me a very important lesson: never trust autosave. What do i mean by that? You'll see later.

Anyways, I was doing great! I made the final boss's attacks, as well as the script that made him activate the shield. After that, i created the main menu, with buttons to save your game, load it, or see the credits. I also made the tutorial you see when booting up the game, with text to explain to you what everything does. My sister (not the one who playtested) started making the backgrounds and decorations. It was all smooth-sailing, until...

...Construct crashed. Yep. I did lose all the progress i did that day. I did lose the boss's scripts. And I did cry and rage. Fortunately, the backgrounds my sister had made were saved, since it was not added to the Construct project yet. However, I did have to spend half the rest of the day trying to redo what i lost.

Thursday

After losing half a day of progress, Thursday paid off. I added the backgrounds and decorations my sister made into the game, as well as making the enemy and character sprites myself. The game looked almost like the finished project. After adding tilemaps, backgrounds and drawing, i called my sisters and mom to playtest. They said it was fun, and we all laughed at the attempts of my sister (not the one who made the backgrounds, the one who playtested first) at the boss. After that, i made the end screen when you beat the boss, and that wrapped up the day.

Friday

Friday was the day of sounds. I recorded some weird sounds with my mouth and added them into the game. When my sister (the one who made the backgrounds this time) playtested the game with all sounds, she laughed at it, and i took it as "This is cool!". After almost having a heart atack with my game not uploading because some things had accents (like chefão), i was able to upload the game to itch.io, submit my entry to the jam, and at the time i'm writing this devlog, rating isn't open yet.

Woah. That was fun. Game jams are much better than i used to think, and i would be happy to join another one.