2022-02-18

Cultures of Chaos

Yesterday was another busy day of chores and errands, mostly just spent getting ready for the mini jam, which leads me to my next point: day 1 of the Mini Jam has begun!

Overload Mini Jam

10:30a

After stewing on a variety of game ideas over the last 12ish hours, I think I've landed on something that seems like it would be fun to build, and fun to play, while maintaining realistic goals.

The overload mini jam's "limitation" is chaos. I learned that there is a genus of amoeba called "chaos" - so I'm thinking a simple 2D melee game where you're an amoeba and you have to survive in a culture environment (think "petri dish") will be a fun little project. I think this'll lend itself well to my larger sabbatical game goals, too (as opposed to building something completely different).

Chaos (genus)

Time to get started!

11:45am

Bootstrapping the Godot project. Aiming for NES-ish graphics. 256x240, with 16x16 character sprites. I roughed together a simple 4-frame amoeba spritesheet as a placeholder. Setting up the finite state machine and physics layers now. Time for a lunchbreak, though (and a dog walk).

12:45pm

Back into it...

3:15pm

My amoeba can fire projectiles, lol.

11:00pm

I played with this on and off throughout the evening, I have a nice setup right now with locomotion, projectiles, a basic UI, and attribute tracking. Tomorrow I think I'll jump into enemy creation, then damage jazz.

Stretch goals include:

larger playing field

alternative damage modes

health "potions"

multiple enemy types

npcs? landmarks?

On an unrelated note, I started Xenoblade Chronicles 1 tonight, I am so stoked! I played XBC2 first, and loved it, so I'm looking forward to this game. It should be a nice balance with the upcoming Elden Ring...

XBC1

XBC2

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