Devlog "Weekly Game Jame #150"

Theme: "YOU ARE THE ENEMY"

Friday, 22-05-2020:

Before the final theme was announced, I was pretty sure it would be this theme. So while jogging (I am currently doing the 7-days-every-day-jogging-challenge) I already thought about ideas for this jam. Pretty quickly, I thought about a cute little game, where you are an evil wizard that takes joy in making other people miserable. The wizard hates colors, life and anything happy - so he takes joy in removing colors from a village. Why? Why not?

I tried to adhere to my rule of first scribbeling ideas and game mechanics in a word document before doing any coding! So I listed all game mechanics I would need to do, all artwork I would need and thought about what the game makes FUN to play... I always stuggle with this bit, I am easily distracted by cute graphics or cool but simple scripts, but making games fun is really hard. So I successfully procrastinated and thought about the background story of the evil wizard character. Why he became evil, what triggered him to take revenge - in doing so I actually discovered that "chromophobia" actually exists. The fear of colors. So it seems that my wizard now has chromophobia! 

Before going to bed, I also looked for inspirational artwork that I want to aim for. Maybe a combination of drawings and pixelart?

Saturday, 23-05-2020:

This morning went reaaaaaaaaaaally well! I quickly had a prototype for my scripting done. I had a bunch of squares with scripts attached to them - when the game starts, each square gets a random color assigned, when clicking on it, it turns grey. HOORAY, that was easy!

That also meant that I could replace the stock photo of the village with my own drawing. After an hour, I had a decent town and a decent wizard drawn, scanned, slightly edited and included in the game:

Blessed by this quick success, I immediately thought about expanding the game: Why not use the colors that you "collect" from the village to build up your strength so you can cast even more evil spells? Maybe cast eternal darkness onto the village? Or a smelly cloud that makes the poor villages throw up? Where is the limit for the evilness? Is there a limit?

Now it's time to draw the shapes in GIMP so I can layer them on top of the background village image and link them to the color-changing script :) 

Puh, 4 hours later, I have created all the individual tiles! Quite a bit of work for this effect, but I think it looks nice:

After a break, I added a bit more: The book, the "cast eternal darkness" spell and a counter for how many color I collected:

Sunday, 24-05-2020:

A very unsuccessful day. I've tried 3 hours to make a simple feature and failed. I wanted a jar that displays the exact colors asthe clicked tiles. I had to resort to the beloved unity scripting forum to point out my mistake. But eventually, it worked! A useless feature, but it looks nice! Enough drama for one day. Did I mention that for beginners, it is REALLY hard to understand arrays and how to wrap your head around combining two arrays?!

Monday 25-05-2020:

I used my lunch break to work on a simple tune for the game. For some reason I felt inspired by the terminator soundtrack and the metal heartbeat you can hear. A famous piece of music history - but far out of reach for a beginner like me. BUT: I still like the simple tune. It gets boring after 2 minutes, but the entire game only takes 2 minutes, so I should be fine. Also, don't aks me what key the song is in, because I have no clue.

Tuesday, 26-05-2020:

I created a simple menu, a tutorial page, an about section and a victory screen:

Wednesday, 27-05-2020:

Almost done! Just 24 hours left and I am right on schedule! I added a 2min narrative as an intro (amazing effect on my voice to make it sound deeper haha). Fixing some typos, test-running it 10x to make sure all buttons work, no major glitches exist. Then it is compiling time and uploading the baby on  itch.io for release. My 4th game jam game! That is almost one each month, ever since I started the GameDev journey.

Friday, 05-06-2020:

Results are in: Out of 176 entries (submissions) I scored really well - wow!

Overall, rank 25, that is crazy. Even more crazy: Creativity rank 4! What the heck?! That is amazing. That is 4/176, that is in the top 2,27% of all games submitted! I feel like game jams with ratings are incredibly rewarding. even if you score low, you have some tangible categories to work on. I really appreciated some extensive feedback from fellow gam jammers. 

Thanks to to organizers of the jam! I shall be back!