Monday left me thinking
Tuesday, I was still thinking
Wednesday, my empty arms were busy
Thursday, rushing my uni work, rushing my uni work

Thank the stars, it's Friday
I'm doing work like a fire gone wild on Saturday
Guess I'll be making the whole game on Sunday
I'll be rushing the jam, rushing the jammmmm

And that is my incredible parody of Waiting For Love by Avicii, which is all I had created before Sunday came around! This has been an extremely busy week for me as it turned out. I'm probably going to end up rushing this devlog out on the last day as well, as that business has still not gone anyway... 

As it says everywhere on the page I ended up creating the game in one day. I would have actually had slightly longer if I'd come up with a better concept the night before, but instead, I wasted about 4 years on Saturday night creating a nice river generation system that I never got to use in my game. I'm actually rather proud of this, hence why I've thrown it in this devlog!

On top of that, I also created a small farmhouse in Unreal that was going to be used for another concept that I just didn't have the time to get out. This idea was really cool, it was going to be a bit StardewValley3D-esk with ecosystems built in. Had I had the time I think this game would have been awesome, and who knows, next time I'm feeling like doing some UE5 I might pick up the project again! For now, all that there is to show is this nice little farmhouse, based on a Minecraft youtube series I watched when I was 12...

In the end, I almost ended up making a game with no visuals at all, so what was learnt from this truly was useless haha! So Sunday came around and I was struggling for ideas, I had the first idea of a small little survival game on Saturday, hence the rivers, but there was no way I was going to be able to add everything I wanted in time to make it fun. Instead, I took a shower and came up with a small terrarium management game idea, which would be basically entirely UI based allowing me to avoid spending too much time doing intricate pixel art. This is the game I ended up with in the end and it's pretty simple. All the different plants and animals rely on each other, and you just buy and sell them to balance the ecosystem to allow you to grow it.

The concept relied heavily on being able to make the experience relaxing, and judging by the feedback that worked out well in the end. Originally I hadn't even planned in time for the "nice" artwork in the top corner, but by staying up until 4am I was able to implement it all and get that nice audio working.

I ended up settling for Godot in this jam, and honestly, I'm not quite sure why. Anyone who was there for the previous jam may remember my feelings toward Godot's UI system...

As you may have noticed, this game is almost entirely UI based. I probably would have been better off coding it from scratch in HTML than using Godot, and currently, the UI still doesn't work properly on Firefox (my main web browser), ios, or MacOS... But on the other hand, I didn't want to use Unity as I use it primarily for work, Unreal was a bit too heavy for this, I wanted the game to be web-based and I didn't really want to start entirely from scratch on a new web project... So Godot is what I somehow ended up with and honestly, bar the export issues, it all went relatively smoothly.

I may not like Godot's UI much, but the node system did lend itself really well to making the scrollable lists that make up a large part of the menu. You may also notice that I reused the font I created for the last GoedWare jam. This was originally to save time, but quite frankly, trying to convert the bitmap font from Godot 3 to Godot 4 ended up taking well over an hour out of my already limited time and I probably should have just started from scratch. The asset I had used in the GoedWare7 jam to import the bitmap font hasn't been ported to Godot 4, at least at the time of doing the jam, so I ended up having to set up the bitmap font file to be imported completely differently and it was this whole hectic thing that I never want to touch again... Anyway, less learnt: Godot support for bitmaps is still extremely good, once you've found a way to import said bitmap.

And I think that's about it. Honestly, having made the game in probably about 16 hours it's all kind of a blur. I kind of did a bit of everything at once, and the ability to sell plants wasn't even in until the final hour! Hope everyone who checked it out had a good time playing, and I look forward to checking out the rest of the entries later in the week when I'm less busy!