Just Another GameJam Devlog

It's submitted, the main intent behind making this game was to learn how to implement a shader. Originally, I was looking for a CRT monitor shader, but I found across a Gameboy one and decided it would be an easier to make a Gameboy game. After brainstorming briefly, I roughly threw together a prototype. 

A player-controlled character moved around the screen dropping bombs to hit enemies. The bombs were explosive, and the enemies were blobs. This is when I started to put in the Gameboy shader. It was easier then i expected as it came with a how to and an example. The entire game is in a wrapper so regardless of what scene is playing it goes through the same shader. In the future I will rethink how I do scene transitions using viewports.

At this point I re-read the GamJam brief so I could shoehorn that in. I changed the bomb to a firebomb, and the enemies to waling sausages. It is almost impossible to not make a 16x16 sausage sprit that does not look phallic. Next, I changed to bomb into a re-usable item, so the player had to drop it and then return to get it. Later I would add a second bomb to increase the speed of the game. 

The game needed more of a reason to play it, I decided on a high score feature, and had always wanted to try one everyone could see. After researching I found Silent Wolf. This tool does all the hard work and has great instructions on how to install. It was probably the feature to take the most time to implement, needing a way to submit, and somewhere to view the top scores as well.

Finally, I added a small amount of polish, sounds, a main menu banner, a main menu animation showing how the game is played and tweaked a lot of other bits.

This project would have really benefited from having a longer design stage. I spent about 5 minutes thinking about what I was going to program, and few problems that came up would have been solved easier if I had planned longer.

The finished game isn't great, but I learned new things and had fun. For a game I spent about 15 hours on I'm happy with the finished game.