We have reached the pre-alpha stage in our game dev progress. Will be focuing majorly on assets and some code and then will move to polishing and bug fixing.

We are a team of two, will be using Unreal Engine 4 for this jam. It is an interesting theme and we look forward to contribute to it.

I spent way too long on different simulation approaches… The largest part is still to do: the actual gameplay! :D

My team (Tengukaze Studios) are in! It's our first jam.
We'll make a game about our planet after years of global warming.

Hey everybody !

I'm just found out this jam was in the way and I join it as happy as ever to make a game about a subject that i've been documenting and thinking about for years !

I'll try to make a game with Twine, it's a small game engine for text games (http://twinery.org/)

Wish luck to everybody here, have fun !! :)

(also sorry for my english)

Officially started my jam this afternoon! Here's a gif from three hours in:

To those of you following along, I had to find a new ffmpeg command to get better palette usage in the gifs. This code is pretty similar, but generates much better images than the last command I posted:
ffmpeg -i source.mp4 -vf "fps=15,scale=480:-1:flags=lanczos,split[s0][s1];[s0]palettegen[p];[s1][p]paletteuse" -loop 0 -ss 1.5 -to 10.5 output.gif

On the code side, I've been messing around with curves and color tints, to make sure that my plan for art tomorrow will work. The idea is to draw all of the vegetables and leaves in a monochrome white/gray style, and then tint them in code so that they can change colors as they grow. I may also tint the vine based on what vegetable it grew from, but I have to see if it looks good. I'm working on the vines right now, they will be built up leaf by leaf, likely tracing a slightly randomized curve of the real path on the grid.

(not a button, just needed a non-white background for these images. is there a better way to do that?)

In gameplay, I'm making decent progress. You can see drag and drop working in the gif (it's even disabled until all cards are dealt), and when the board is finished it'll register valid moves and draw the next card from the deck. The bouncing path that cards follow is actually just a single Curve2D with well placed control points, so their positions only interpolate to the numbers 1-5 from 0, with a delay. Super easy and satisfying polish, that I can tweak later.

As a final thought, I'll admit that I haven't been sprinting as much as I wanted to yet. I still have ~12 of my first 24 hours left, but gameplay and balancing was supposed to be mostly done by the end of day 1. I'm taking it easier than a weekend jam because I don't want to burn out midway through, and I even think sleep is more important right now. We'll see if that comes back to bite me later… on to day two!

Okay, due to procrastination reasons I only started today, but since work always expands to completely fill the allowed time, I'm not too worried about this week :D

So far, I do have a basic "planet" map and the simulation model can work with seasons and sunlight exposure. I'll expand this to a better model of planetary climate now. And when the basic mechanisms are in place, it's time for gameplay. The plan is to make a Civ-style management game where you have to bring your planet through the anthropocene without killing everybody…

Well I promised daily updates, but I'll keep this one short because I didn't start my jam today. Last week was very busy, and I kind of crashed hard today because of it. I decided to take the day to just relax and play video games, to recover my energy before this seven day marathon kicks off. But I can only procrastinate so long, so I'll be starting tomorrow morning for sure!

I also looked into imagemagick and ffmpeg today, to get a decent lightweight mp4 to gif converter set up. The command line interface is easier for me, and it's just one line to get from a recorded OBS mp4 file to a trimmed, resized gif:

ffmpeg -i source.mp4 -r 15 -vf scale=360:-1 -loop 0 -ss 00:00:03.5 -to 00:00:30 output.gif

The options here let you set framerate (15 FPS, regardless of video input framerate), size (360px height with preserved aspect ratio width), and start and end times in seconds. This has been a bottleneck in previous jams for me, so I'm glad I sorted this out ahead of time. It takes about 5 minutes to record and upload a gif now, which means I'll be doing them in every post this week. See you guys tomorrow!

my teammate and I are here to dev about saving the planet and the power of veggies!
good luck fellow jammers

Being away from home this week I'm aiming for something small, so here's a couple rough game ideas I had to put aside, feel free to find inspiration in them:

Graygreen City (Strategy/Puzzle)

The player has to transform a polluted city into a greener one. The view is top-down, tile-based. The gameplay consists in spending slowly refilling money by replacing tiles from certain types into other types, the goal being to reinvent the way cities are organized in order to pollute less.

• Tile types: Road, Housing, Pavement, Offices, Shops, Parks.
• Variables:
  • Pollution (increases with cars on roads, parks reduce it, you win if you get to zero)
  • Productivity (increases with the time people spend at work, the higher the more money you get)
  • Anger (increases when people take longer to reach work/market, lowers with time, you get fired/lose if maxed out)
• Units:
  • Car (moves fast on roads, cannot go to a tile occupied by another car)
  • Pedestrian (moves slowly on the pavement, can overlap other pedestrians)
• Citizen AI: 1 housing tile = 1 citizen, attached to a random Office on the map (rerolled if deleted), and the nearest market to its home. Each citizen loops between "Home until 6am > Work until 12am > Home until 6pm > Shop until 12pm". Can either move as a car or a pedestrian, but will always use the car if it is faster than walking.

Comments : It might take a while to get right in terms of balancing. The AI should be fun to code but a bit long to complete. And yes, you can probably win by replacing everything with parks, maybe the city population at victory time is your final score?

The Path to Laughing with Salad (Walking sim or Text game)

This could work either as a walking simulator (made with RPG Maker for instance), or simply a simple interactive story. Something visual like a top down RPG view with some interactions would probably work best though.

The player goes through a typical day. The first day plays itself without any choices, the protagonist having certain habits. A certain event makes them suddenly willing to change their routine for the better good. Throughout the next day and onwards the player is faced with multiple difficult choices. What's better for the environment might have a negative impact in the short term (especially in terms of comfort), but turn out helpful in the long run:

• Going to work by car or bike: If you pick the bike, at first you arrive late and sweaty. You fix the first problem by setting the alarm clock earlier the next day, and the sweatiness by preparing a change of clothes. After a few days like this you get fit and don't even sweat anymore.
• Buying transformed or fresh foods: The food you cook yourself is terrible at first, but you get better (reading recipes in the evening can help). You also have to choose the quantities you buy, and will most probably fail with rotten leftovers or not enough food at first.
• Bring homemade food to work: Linked to the previous item. If you don't bring food, you'll have to choose between an expensive place or one whose packaging lead to a lot of waste.
• Turn the heat up at home or not: If you keep the heat low, you get annoyed by the cold but eventually get into the habit of wearing warmer clothes at home.

Various possible endings to that once the player has reached a green enough lifestyle. Maybe something to hint at an apparent uselessness of all the effort when there are industries nearby blasting waste at a different scale…