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Game Jam Logs

My life is like a video game, trying hard to beat the stage. All while I am still collecting coins...


Game Jam?

This sunday is a COMBINATION STREAM of LCOLONQ ANNIVERSARY + 2048 FOLLOWERS + TWITCH TV PARTNER CELEBRATION SPECIAL.
it will last 20 hours and 48 minutes and clonk will finally GAME ON STREAM.


as part of the celebration, clonk has opened(?) a Game Jam about?? computer?? Cool Game??? not sure really. but a game jam is there.

Since I can't really contain myself, I will start working on it after power napping, which should net me about 48 hours to work on it. How fitting.


Logs??

I will be logging my thought process and what I did basically before and in that 48 hours here.
Most of the updates will be after the jam retrospective since I'll be too focused to have time writing.
hopefully people find this entertaining, maybe give a sense to how a jam is like maybe. idk.
this is my first jam which is kinda exciting, ive done game in a day challenges but with no stake and pressure.


Game

Final Version: the completed version of the game

Source Code

Windows Version

Linux Version (note: lag)

HTML Web Version (note: no saves, no shaders, lag)


Friday Version: what will be on the stream (probably)

Source Code

Windows Version

Linux Version (note: lag)

HTML Web Version (note: no saves, no shaders, lag)


Jam Version

What I managed to make in 48 hours, no future edits

Source Code

Windows Version

Linux Version (note: bit janky, lag)

HTML Web Version (note: bit janky, no saves, no shaders, lag)


Before the Jam

Before going eepy time i did some checkups on my setups and tools I'll be using in this jam.

I will be using the accursed engine since I'm not doing anything fancy and I must go fast, being experienced makes you fast and all that.

For assets, I will be using Krita and Aseprite with every plugins under the sun, a Samsung Pen, and FL Studio with Serum and a few free sample packs.


I have a general idea of what I must make in this jam. not features, but philosophies.



Can't believe my hours of watching el vods came to clutch here, but we'll be using this for inspiration.


Advanced Gamester Rhetorics

Here are a detailed list of things clonk needs in his video games to enjoy, and a summary of the on-screen list.


As mentioned in the VOD, this formula was drafted to create a hypothetical Ideal Game. clonk summarizes the ideal game as:


This is a good formula. And while clonk is trying to incorporate these elements into Oubliette of General, when I saw these bullet point I had one answer in my head.

I'm embracing my Stereotypical Korean Indie Developer roots and making a roguelike(kinda). That's all i'm saying for now.

And it is time to sleep. See you in 7 hours at 10PM KST.


Mid-dev nonsense

This is gibberish zone! may contain pained groans and incoherent ramblings. it's still fun to look at someones WIP stuff ig

no promises on quality or quantity tho!


Starting off the gauntlet with power food making style move

Curry rice and seaweed


Alright, lets look at clonk's list of gaming.

The fun thing is, half these points are naturally integrated with the gameplay style of your average action roguelikes.


This will definitely help in us fulfilling all of these requirements.

Since we don't really have much time, I will keep things small scope as possible and gradually add stuff once I'm done with the barebones structure. im piling spaghettis on that codebase, its jams baby

Here are the structure im currently looking for:


I'm probably going for a sidescroller approach, doing what i do best and implementing a physics engine for fun

Game references:


Thankfully i say on top of my rogue flows so these are all games ive played

Let's get to making games!


I like making "embryo pages" that are basically just a large canvas of things i have in mind about hte game. I can refer to this page for a huge chunk of the fundamentals to details. (45 hours left)

quick spriting... (44 hours left)

Executive Decision: I'm going to put animating each player state on hold since its going to take a while and VFX will cover most of it anyways

quickly thrown together a character creation system. these will be saved to your local and "ghost" save.

implemented a hair and cosmetic system to save clonk from the crippling threat of ballness.

pictured is a Gamer. (about 30 minutes from last update)

...and then it took me 30 minutes to write just item names and unlock conditions. fuuck im slow at writing.

I've then created generic textbox and button objects that I can maipulate on the fly thanks to 2.7 making GML into Javascript 2. tons of functional programming going on here.

Here's the "Little Guy" part of the game finished. now for the actual game. (42:20 remain)

1 hour break was had. ate ramen.

I've created an input system, disabling buttons, and most importantly save feature. saves are just a bunch of stuff in a json structure.

The inputs will also be used for wishes, and events can be triggered on each type or on enter. (40:30 remaining)


Okay, seeing the same green backward with stats is getting boring, let's move on to something more exciting: title screen.

What will await you once you press that "Save" button? well, we'll have to make a loading system before getting there.

Yay! saves!

one of the more stupid engine stuff the accursed engine does is sandboxing the file system so you can't access any files from outside. Thankfully sometime during 2 point something there is now an option to disable this. I have done that, idk if this fucks with the permissions.

Saves are now saved in the same directory, as save.json! (40 hours remaining)


Had some good ramen break (again, what can you say i love that thing), this is what i would classify as the first major break of this jam. (37:30 remaining)

Onto the real game. I've designed a lobby where you pick up one of the three "infinite" starter weapon to lock in your class, and pick where you want to head into.

What we need now are Terrain, Physics and Weapons. back to aseprite!


I whipped up 3 different square textures with varying sizes and collaged them together for a quick lobby terrain. We're inside of the computer!

I've also took some time to support variable resolution and stole some bloom shaders from startellers. (36:30 remaining)


Physics is here! you can now jump, fall down, hop on semisolids and move around.

This time I'm going for a high-gravity, fast moving type action. Getting inspiration from scourgebringer (above) or more traditional action games.

Characters zooming around would also make it easier to mask the lack of animation i think.

Unlike the cursed mathematics hellhole that is Startellers, this one's made extremely simply. uses the oldest tricks in the book.

It doesnt care for accuracy or realism at all, does celeste calculation with NES style subpixels. this insane corner cutting made me able to code an entire physics engine in just an hour. (35:30 remaining)

Onto the weapons. before we go there, I should think of some weapons...


I've designed 12 weapons (for now) and implemented them into the game. I still have to set the values and fill in the flavor texts but i can do that later

right now im kinda eepy so ill be going to sleep but after that we will focus on Enemy and Resources. the goal is to get a single room working before we venture into procedual generation.

(34 hours remaining)


Gomoco! i'll be getting some breakfast, getting coke for the Grand Stream, and start making some enemies! (26:30 remaining)


Enemies are here! I've created a simple finite state machine system with events to hook to and all that. also I've cracked out some aseprite for some UI stuff.

I've also filled up on dinner and pizza since night is falling, it's time for the stream to truly begin and for the Game to be Jammed. (22:30 remaining)


I got briefly distracted by the insanely funny dark souls stream but I've implemented a streamlined way to create hitboxes and make weapons functional. Time for DEATH.


It is done! I've also cleared up a lot of AI and weapon related code to be extensible. both enemies and the player can die, no ui yet though. (17:20 remaining)

Sudden urge to make particle system and screenshake (17:00 remaining)

With 16:30 remaining, we finally get to the roguelike part of the game dev. we're making rooms! I've already done some work on the camera front, I just need to get the rooms working.


Finishing off the lobby. I should make drops... (16:10 remaining)


drops, ui, lobby complete (15:00 remaining)


a (13:45 remaining)


created stunned system, damage numbers and more systems. ok lets actually actually actually get to procedual generation (13 hours remaining)


procedual generation is done!!!! now its all content now (10:40 remaining)


Made regrabbing much more tolerable but in exchange added a durability system. also added support for golden/plus weapons. (9:30 remaining)


creating stages!!! (8:20 remaining)


i had to debug and eventually rewrite the entire thing from scratch, this is bad!!! so much time spent, i will have to do some drastic shit!! (5:10 remaining)


Maps are done, i genuinely dont have time now so ill be placing debug enemies (LOL)


for ultimate crunch mode i had this open in my second monitor along with clonk's stream, it was actually so clutch all the way through i would delete it one by one


Wish system implemented! its a bit janky but it works (3 hours remaining)

then I spent making an example AI for the boss, then another hour making backgrounds and fixing bugs


with 1 hour remaining, I had to do the entire sfx and music. I just threw in some of my instruments, master filtered krush and called it a day it was actually so close


Export Bonanza

Okay, with 30 minutes remaining, I must export the game! thankfully the windows version is a 1 click.

I wanted to show the game off in stream to have some video proof though, so I quickly rushed to import options and


????

and I click it and you have to hook up a VM???

(this is especially fucked up bc GMS doesnt have a linux version)

anyways, I try to export into HTML5 at least and it doesn't boot up??


That should do it. and now i boot up and


it looks so crunchy?????? turns out i had to check some platform specific boxes. so i do that and its much better now

first bgm doesn't load due to funny security web moment (user must click before any audio can play) but the time was up so we got 2 minutes of gameplay

and that gameplay...


oh.

anyways, after the jam I worked on a linux build. I made a ubuntu vm as per requested, compiled in there, sent file to my LMDE machine for testing.


?

yeah turns out you need a 1.0 version of libcrypto and libssl because funny gms moment, i had to scour the internet for them as the packages are mostly relics of the past.

they probably have hella vulns as well but I got them through Steam's libs (thanks reddit) and packaged them inside the game tarball as well.

that's all for jam build! yay


Post-Jam Content

clonk will play games on friday, so I should make things as good as possible before then.

While i was working on the linux versions and whatnot, I played the game a few times and wanted to fix some things.

weapons were too strong, damage calculation could be better, and obviously what happened at the stream.

also I wanted to implement some things that weren't there on the jam build, notably class system and more weapon/levels.

run end screen is something we need for sure. let's get working!