Day 1 - The first of the many devlogs.

Day 1

Time to announce im working on this, although this isnt really an announcement since Ill only make this public closer to the end of the jam.

With the theme revealed of Love, Death and Robots, I immediately had no idea what to make. I knew what each thing was separately, but couldnt think of a way to combine them. After a bit of time passed, I thought about the Zombies game mode in Call Of Duty, and decided to make something similar, although 2D and top down and not having zombies. Basically the opposite of it, but I thought if I replaced the zombies with robots and changed the bullets to hearts to represent love, I might be able to get away with something similar although different. However game jams are about learning, and thinking of a crazy game idea can help me learn in the future how to make a game idea.

Then after I came up with this idea, in the official Goedware Discord, I found out that Love, Death & Robots was actually a Netflix TV series, however after I had a glance at it, I don't think I would've been any good at making a game based on it. I believe it was good that I came up with my idea before hand, as that allowed me to focus on specifically making a game I could make, then replacing certain features with small easy to change things that allow it to fit the theme.

Later I started work in GDevelop 5, the same game engine I used last time. I decided to make a small prototype of the game first, instead of the title screen because in my last game jam game, found here https://user8426.itch.io/the-grand-race , I started work on the main menu and settings which ended up taking so long, I had practically no time to polish the main game itself, causing me to get 6th overall in rating which in some ways isn't bad but it was 6/15 and in my last jam from the same group who hosted the jam, I placed 6th overall, found here https://itch.io/jam/gabjam3/rate/1163917 . 

So far I have some basic AI, a player, some walls and some basic weaponry, which is hearts for the player, lasers for the robots, which may not seem like a lot, but I can now focus on polishing these features and improving them so that I can hopefully start work on a nice map and title screen and maybe even settings.

One thing I want to add before I end this devlog, since its getting quite long, is the major bug I experience today. Recently the game engine, GDevelop 5 updated the Electron version it used, which may or may not have caused a weird freezing bug. Basically if the player shot too much too quickly, the game froze. After a bit of time the game would unfreeze but anytime a heart tried to spawn, the game would freeze and stop freezing the moment it wasn't being created. To fix this, I just added a fire rate variable because I think its my best option of getting it fixed and working in GDevelop 5 for this jam since I have only 8 days so if I waited for the bug to be fixed and reported it in the Github, there's a good chance I could run out of time.

Thanks for reading and good luck if your going to submit a game!