And so, my day 2 begins, and I have a hell of a lot of work to do.

I really didn’t get much done yesterday, even though I was working at it for ages. Spent most of the day tweaking a couple of features rather than moving on to the next ones, and I never really had a plan either.

Here’s roughly how it went:

• Spent a couple of hours trying to get an idea I was happy with, which wasn’t easy given the non-theme (it’s a mechanic, not a theme). I didn’t want to do a roguelike or endless runner as they were too obvious and likely to be loads of them made, and my other ideas were far too big.
• Took about an hour and a half to create a player sprite. Nothing fancy, just a single 32×32 frame, but I suck at art and I just couldn’t get it to a point I was happy with.
• The rest of the day was taken up with creating a basic environment for the player to move about in. Again, this took way too long as it’s just a single screen with blocks around the edges (2D top-down). There were a couple of points that I focussed on far too much:

1. When the player hit the blocks diagonally, he tended to stick. I’ve had this problem a few times on other projects, and stupidly decided that now was a good time to get it sorted. I eventually got the player sliding properly though, with just the occasional stickiness on the top wall.
2. I wanted to implement darkness and have the player’s vision limited. This is quite easy to do in 3D, or even in 2D with other toolchains, but I had never got it working satisfactorily in GameMaker: Studio. I have now though! The bit that really took the time wasn’t the actual implementation, but getting a torch/vision shape that I was happy with. I started with a circle, feathered at the outside, and then struggled for ages trying to get a decent arc shape that was both bright enough and didn’t have hard edges.

So, after about 11 and a half hours of work, this is what I managed:

It’s not much, but I did have fun, and have learned some new stuff in GameMaker: Studio, so not all bad.

Today, I’m going to do things a bit more like I usually do:

• Create an issue list of things for me to work through.
• Implement basic functionality for each of the desired features, rather than polishing one or two.
• Try and get a proof-of-concept or first playable build.

I may need to make this a jam entry rather than compo as I doubt I’ll have much by the end of today, but I’ll see how far I do get first.

Anyway, time to get to work!