A different approach
I've participated in a handful of jams by now and it has always been a lot of fun. Generally I've approached jams always by just opening my IDE of choice and hacking away some C++ code with SFML. More often than not, this lead to having no clear vision of what I actually want to achieve, which again lead to missing code structures and thus poor code quality. Plus since I spend pretty much all the time on coding, I didn't have time to put some more work into the programmer art and music.
For LD #39 I'm trying a different approach by starting out more with the art and sound part, making a clear plan for the coding side. The risk here is that the coding part does require a lot of time and since it's more in the second half/near the end, I might not making it. But at least I'll hopefully have some nice screenshots of programmer art stuff to show.
So far I've done some brain storming around the term power.
As usual the first ideas all involved some platformer and collecting things. I really don't know why my brain is so wired for all these platformer ideas, then again I do really like playing some neat platformer.
But after some thinking I decided to go with top down 2D puzzle/exploring gaming. For some reason the ROBOT games series came to my mind. I've played those games for many, many hours even if I never really understood all the mechanics.
Since I'm a big sci-fi fan, I decided to put the game into space and so far decided on some layout of two bands of 2x5 rooms and an additional 3x3 room for the generator/engine. Here are my initial notes for it.
Now the overall goal is to collect fusion pallets from around the space station to power the fusion generator in the center of the station. But to get there you also have to collect some key cards to open doors and fight some form of mobs. Your suit acts as shield and makes you move faster, but it relies on energy as well, so every now and then you'll have to collect some additional power cells or recharge you at one of the few charging stations.
For inspirational purposes and to maybe get some feel for the color palettes and how things might shape, I've quickly put together a small mood board.
The next steps will be to create most of the tile images and design different rooms. So far I've picked out various tools to help me achieve this. Some of which are quite new to me, while I'm more familiar with others.
Image tools
Sound tools
Dev tools
Utilities
Libraries
I'll update things as I go.