... but there's a bug I'd like to fix, two or three small features and a bit of extra polish that I'd like to add - so we're going to see how much of that we can squeeze into tomorrow evening.
In the mean-time here's a our title screen:
And a GIF of the current gameplay:
Good luck to everyone submitting for the competition now!
I haven't really worked on any game projects since Ludum Dare 45 - even though that went quite well. So it's time to get my jam on again!
@Cyberwiz doesn't feel like he'll survive a weekend of coding during the endless home office, but he said he'll come along for the ride as long as he just needs to do sound and music.
We'll be using PICO-8 as it helps to keep my ambitions in check - plus it's fun to work with!
I've made a list of rough game ideas for all the themes in the final voting round, in the hope of not being stuck without ideas when I see the theme tomorrow morning.
Good luck, everyone - have fun!
We decided to try to make a game based on Conway's Game of Life in tribute to John Conway, who passed away recently.
By the end of Day 1, we had a working Game of Life simulation, but it was slow enough to be a bit annoying to play. We are using PICO-8 so computationally heavy stuff is a bit difficult to get right. So I spent most of last night trying to improve the speed and broke rendering in the process. By midnight last night, I was utterly hopeless that we would finish anything resembling a game, even though we had significant progress in other areas like with music where @lazygamedevza already composed two tracks for the game.
After sleeping way too late this morning, I had a very productive 2 hours where I fixed all of the current problems except for the performance issue! I even managed to add the seed spawning and collecting mechanic, which will form the basis of the economy in the game, so I have hope again that we could turn this into a game!
Here's what it looks like at this point:
I've spent the last 2 hours coming up with a list of about 20 cool mechanics ideas and prioritized the top 5 that would make this into a game you can win or lose. So I'll focus on getting those done as quickly as possible today, along with maybe a second pass at optimizing our Game of Life. Then tomorrow add as much cool stuff as I can!
@lazygamedevza has to work tomorrow, so he's going to help today wherever he can, but mainly work on making sure to document everything needed to release from PICO-8, so that I'll have a smooth submission hour tomorrow evening.
We're calling it a day for Day 2!
At this point I'm comfortable calling it a game: - You can win by casting the spell of Nature Mastery. - You can lose by dying of hunger. - You have a boring core game loop of collecting seeds and eating (maybe supplemented with some fun Conway experiments).
We've also got the performance issue nearly completely eliminated now (from 800% of our frame CPU budget, down to 200%).
Here's a short clip showing the Conway simulation in action:
We just finished and submitted our entry with more of our TODO items completed than last jam! It's not perfect - this time we opted for substance over style, so fewer animations and more gameplay mechanics.
It's not perfect, but Conway's Game of Life is a core part of the mechanics, so we hope it is a fitting tribute.
