Hello, nonexistent readers!

As I am writing this, it is day four of the TouchTomorrow Game Jam. Our submission is due on Saturday--in four days.

We've made decent progress over the last two days. Most of this has been level design, but we've also done some work on art,  music, organization, and programming.

Level Design

We had two level design meetings--one on Sunday, and another on Monday. We met for three hours on Sunday and managed to design levels 1, 2, 3, and 5. We finished up with level 4 and the boss fight yesterday.

I had initially planned for us to complete the level design in one day, but WPI announced the game prompt a day early, giving us extra time. This ended up being for the best, as our staff were not able to support a meeting longer than three hours; in parallel to this game jam, we're juggling end-of-the-year schoolwork and working towards close deadlines within our FRC team. While working on Lantern, our previous game, it also took two meetings to design all the levels. In future game jams, I'll make sure to set aside two days for level design.

During our first game jam, we used Google Drawings to collaboratively design levels. We created a new Google Drawing for each level and drew a diagram using shape tools. This was not exactly the best tool for what we were trying to do; resizing the document while scaling what we'd already drawn was more difficult than it could have been, and, to our knowledge, there was no way to use a grid template.

This time, we ended up using diagrams.net. We could still collaborate, and while we couldn't see who was on the document or making changes, it worked out better overall. We were able to use grid snap, allowing us to place tiles with precision and thereby making it easier for the programmers to interpret the diagrams. Plus, diagrams.net allows us to make multiple tabs within the same document, so our Google Drive is less cluttered.

In any case, now that the level design is done, we're able to start programming the levels with placeholder assets!

Art

A number of assets were completed on days two and three! On Sunday, we finished the bouncy cloud tiles, a TV sprite that leads to a cutscene, the sprites for the boss at full health, and the sprite that brings the player to the next level. Then, on Monday, we created "nightmare fuel" tiles and the backgrounds for levels 2 and 3.

Check out this super cool level 3 background made by Caitlyn R.!

Music

On Sunday, our music director, MB, completed the song for level 1. The plan is to build the other level songs off of this one. We also created a draft of level 2's song!

Organization

On our GitHub repository for our game's code, I created issues for every task that the software team needs to complete. Consolidating all of the tasks into a place where they'll be going for code anyway makes it easier to keep track of goals. Additionally, under each issue, I provided a checklist of things that need to be done within Godot to complete the task. I'm hoping that this will be helpful and prevent the programmers from forgetting anything.

Programming

After creating the issues, I worked on making placeholder assets, setting up the Player scene, and creating level 1. These are all fundamental parts of the game that the other levels and scenes will rely on. For now, we need to make scenes for common nodes such as obstacles, using level 1 as a testing environment. Afterwards, we can begin piecing together the other levels. Our goal is to finish with the levels by Thursday so that we can move onto the UI and implementing music and the real assets.

This game jam is already looking better than the previous one, especially in terms of programming. Last time, the programming was our downfall, as we started late and were unable to finish in time.

Here's to hoping that we can complete our game this time around! I'll keep posting updates until then.

Best,

Cierra O.

Producer

8-bit Falcons