I'd like to cobble something. I'm getting really rusty and haven't been really completing stuff. The goal is to set expectations really low this time.

I'll be going with Allegro again.

For this jam I have decided to ditch LÖVE and Lua for the good old C++ with SDL2. I have very much enjoyed using lua but being not the most of efficient coders, I like to have a bit of a performance edge. And did I need it :D

I was always a fan of shoot em up games, usually the vertical kind. One thing they don't usually have is destructible terrain.

So there was my idea: "A horizontal shoot em up inside a cave composed of descructible rocks"

What went well

• I really liked coding in c++ again. C++20 has brought a lot of goodies.
• I am very happy with the end result, although all of the boulders are a simple bunch of triangles, piling them up creates a reasonably good approximation.

What went poorly

• I didn't have time to make music and sounds, again.
• What C++ giveth, Windows taketh. I had to modify the code (post jam) to be able to compile the game on windows, and I've spent quite a bit of time making it work.
• Performance is not that great when a lot of stuff is on the screen. Since I am rebuilding all the buffers all the time this is not that surprising.
• Initially the enemies should have been spiders, I wanted them to crawl over the rocks on tiny legs. Haven't had time to code these so blobs you have!

Takeaways

• I really need to make some sounds and music on the side, in order to know what to do during a jam. Learning tools during a 48h jam is way too late.
• The same goes for windows, for the next time I need a solid basecode that has already everything setup to produce binaries on all platforms.

Post jam ideas

• The game needs more juice!
  • Shaking when hit and when big rocks get destroyed.
  • A scrolling parallax background.
• The game needs more content!
  • Noise!!
  • More weapons, bonuses, different enemy types. (e.g.: smart ones that shoot where you will be if moving at the same speed)

Well it's supposed to be raining the whole weekend so there's a good excuse to avoid people for a while :)

This time I think I'll go with C++ and SDL2. My previous jams were done using LÖVE which is great, but a bit unpleasant to debug. I think I'll go with something really simple this time though.

Mid-jam I feared that I won't have anything remotely playable, but in the end I was able to submit something.

What went well

• The scope was rather well chosen all things considered. Fortunately I was able to shave off a lot of features that I have initially planned, without compromising the core gameplay too much.
• I was very pleased to discover the pixel tool in Affinity Photo.
• Choice of a 12x12 tiny block size helped a lot, since this was my first foray into pixel art after two decades.
• Love2d was great to use, I didn't have any hickups.
• Somehow I managed to retain a normal sleep schedule.

What went poorly

• I have realized way too late that my logic for making pieces fall after explosion is wrong. This makes the game harder than intended.
• I've spent too much time animating the conveyor belt, when I realized I could have had it done in a few minutes.
• The controls are not well explained and somewhat unintuitive, they require more work. This is similar to my previous game, so definitely something to work at.
• Too much time wasted just playing around with the game rather than coding.

What's next
I'd like to continue working on this one a bit. There are so many features that the game is missing:

• Music and sound.
• Actual puzzles, requiring some planning.
• More levels.
• Crawling, jumping, falling…

Some of the features I wanted to have in the original game. In my head the game should have looked much more like ancient ruins, in the current version one has to squint quite a bit to find the theme.

• Sand tiles that always spill over.
• Buttons and doors.
• Water and water bricks.
• Traps.

Hey, I am Jozef and this will be my second time participating here. First one was Raycasting Kajam and it was a lot of fun.

Since I am still very green in all game-related stuff, I will be using Love2D and writing everything in Lua (in vim). In my last project I've managed to make my program segfault and never really find out why, so this time around I'll try to avoid that.

I feel that no matter the theme, I will probably end up making something using mostly geometric graphics. One thing I wanted to try was to make music using one of those simplified-music-production mobile apps, so we'll see where that goes.