First game jam for me!

I decided at the last minute to participate (the last minute being 6:15 yesterday evening) and started brainstorming ideas with my partner.

His first idea was an escape room-type game where something changed every 10 seconds. I wasn't hooked on the escape room idea and he thought such frequent change would be too confusing/chaotic. I kept thinking about the escape part of the idea, though, and got the idea for an island with rising water levels, where the player needs to find a way to escape before the island is completely submerged. So Island Escape (super creative name, I know) was born!

You are trapped on a flooding island, with waters rising every ten seconds, and you must find enough parts to build a boat in order to escape the island before it is completely submerged.

I spent the rest of Friday evening fleshing out the idea (with my partner's help, he knows more about boats than me) and went to bed satisfied that I had a solid and more importantly achievable gameplan. I have a lot of trouble keeping my ideas small and contained and resisting scope creep, but this was promising.

I also got a little pixel art character sprite animated.

I then failed miserably at falling asleep and spent probably 4-5 more hours building out a semi-detailed roadmap in Notion (great tool, btw.)

Part of the roadmap with my current progress

I finally got some sleep before waking up and doing more planning (like I said, probably overkill) before diving in to making the game itself! There's not much gameplay yet, but I'm pretty happy with my progress and my path forward!

Colors are weird cause I had trouble compressing the gif enough to be able to upload.

Next up: gathering parts for building a boat!