Day 1 - Dec 1st to 2nd

After thinking on the specific theme for the jam, I settled on a game concept and picked out a couple more assets from opengameart.org. (I’d had the bear in mind from joining.) I spent nearly all my time today cleaning & cutting up sprite sheets and getting them into Godot. The plan for tomorrow is to block out a level and see what I need for environment art. Maybe get into enough of the player controller and behavior code to pretend to play.

Day 2

I posted a clip of the player movement and no one got that it was ice skating. This bothered me maybe way too much. So, I added a backstory intro using Nathan Hoad’s Dialogue addon.

Day 3

Added some basic AI to the penguins and rabbits using State Charts. Player can now throw pine cones that bounce off penguins but don’t hurt, yet.

Day 4

More work refining the ice skating.

Day 5

Getting to “Beta” release, playable game but only 1 level/map that repeats with increasing wave size. Player skills increase each level. Spent more time working in music than I probably should have. I discovered that I’m very motivated by having the game music playing. I was hoping to find something 8-bit that fit the theme, but I didn’t find something that I liked more than what I ended up using. It was really distracting me during playtesting until I buckled and added the best I’d found to that point.

Playtesting this day convinced me the player needed a way to see that penguins had gotten past/behind them. After trying and failing to work out the math for off screen indicators, I added footprints to the penguins. This came with the extra benefit of making them way more menacing (at least in my eyes).

Day 6

Got itch.io’s butler working to push game updates. Added skill caps. Added fullscreen support. Had to choose between more levels and getting rabbit builders working. I decided the rabbit helpers were more important mainly because of the strategy I thought they brought to the gameplay and their sound effects. I’m pretty sure it was the right decision and not sunk cost bias. I do wish I could have gotten their “flee” state working–where they stop their building to run away from penguins that are too close. I had to reduce their move & build speed to balance its loss and I think this made them feel like just a distraction.

Day 7 - Dec 7th to 8th

Added trick shot floating text and sfx. Added resume system–start again from last level with village at full health (except it was bugged until today, Dec 12).

Here’s how the final gameplay ended up:

My original brainstorming included a story mode leading to endless option. Levels changing directions as you moved to other sides of the island. Little peninsulas that you’d have to jump or skate all the way around (where the rabbit blocking in the one side could save you). Player points-based progression–that’s there but with fixed points spent, no player choice or UI. The option to spend points on the rabbits & village instead of the player, for example, add a 3rd layer to starting wall for 1-2 levels of points. And the two main things I never really got ideas about: different weapons and a boss enemy.