WHOOO day one is nearly done (it's very almost nearly midnight here!). Today has been an extremely fun crash course in Godot, mouse anatomy and what's the best tool for online brainstorming (it's Workflowy, by the way).

We are working on a musical game where you control a teeny tiny marching band and have to keep their tune alive in the face of increasingly far-fetched obstacles. We want the music to be a really key part of the mechanic - to force the player to listen to what's gone wrong (pitch, rhythm, timbre) and use their ears to fix it. That means the game is capable of dynamically manipulating each individual mouse-ician's audio track in response to in-game events and player input.

IT ALSO MEANS LOTS OF DRAWING PICTURES OF TINY MUSICIAN MICE:

I am clocking off to pace myself for the next 48 hours. See you tomorrow!

I sort of assumed I would spend most of this weekend writing code. But it turns out game dev is only about 25% writing code, 10% user testing, and the remaining 302% is art. I have SO MUCH newfound respect for video game artists.

So far we've hand-drawn 80 frames of animation, and that's before you start on the background images.

But! Now the mice are in colour!

This is all very exciting, I've never worked under the strict rules before.

Fortunately I've figured out a hack for the "no preexisting art" rule. the player character is a circle. I can't believe I never thought of this before.

Now all I have to do is come up with a few more levels...

...and sound effects I suppose... but that's a tomorrow problem

it's 1:30am here guess it's time to make a splash screen with physics

First ever Compo and just about made it in under the time! (...I did think it ended at 11pm though. cue panicked exporting of game)

Anyway, we have shapes:

We have colours:

We have a bit that my playtesters said looked like the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey:

Play it now: https://binneygames.itch.io/shape-orchard

Can't wait to see what everyone else has made, the other posts look super exciting!!

Is anyone else having severe regret about stuff they didn't get a chance to implement during the jam?

I keep coming up with new things I wish I'd implemented, like UI tweaks, new levels, new mechanics, and ideas for the soundtrack.

Oh well... that'll teach me to prioritise better during the jam next time around!!

Anyway. Screenshot tax, here is a screenshot from my game, please give it a play if you want something that's easy and calming as a weekend break!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/52/shape-orchard