First of all thanks everybody who played and rated my silly little water cat game. And I especially grateful for the comments, the feedback was really positive and very motivational!

Now I want to share some lessons I learned during this Jam. First day of the Jam I dedicated to conceptualizing how mechanics would work and how to design puzzles around them and also I sketched some level designs on paper, the rest of the day I spend coding the movement and physics system. While the GameMaker studio (that this game is created in and that also that sponsoring this Jam, thank you GameMaker) has a good inbuilt physics engine I had no idea how to implement buoyancy with it and also I deduced that coding system that predict throw trajectories with it would be outside of this project scope and timeframe. So I built a very primitive physics system from scratch. Unfortunately, despite primitivity, the code was junky and had bugs. 😔

And it lead to some time being waisted in trying to polish system and fix bugs. The thing that helped me, despite my initial stubbornness, was writing a bedbug system for visualizing collisions and applied forces. While I was sure that I didn’t need it, in actuality it was immensely useful and helped to quickly fix my physics system.

Early gameplay prototype.

You can see how the white collision lines are visible on this key:

So the lesson learned - when you have a slightest problem with your systems - write a tool to bedbug and visualize them, even if you are sure you understand how everything work and you don't need such tools.

And for the reference, the final gameplay and physics look like this:

Next part sometime next week. I will talk about level design in that one.