Game Off 2021 - YourWaifuIsALie

Blog and documentation for Game Off 2021 attempt.

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Project maintained by YourWaifuIsALie Hosted on GitHub Pages — Theme by mattgraham

Game Off 2021 - Day 0

November 01, 2021

https://itch.io/jam/game-off-2021

Always wanted to create games, so what better way to start than to force myself via game jam?

I’m an okay programmer, amateur artist, and know-nothing sound engineer.

Goals

Successful projects need concrete goals. These are the goals for the jam. More goals TBD once I know what game I’m making.

Complete a game

Perhaps unpolished, but something with an actual gameplay loop and assets. Full-cycle experience.

This needs to be explicitly stated since “completion” will constrain decisions.

• It’s okay if it’s janky or imperfect
• Beware of feature creep or over-scoping the design
• No “giving up” halfway through like my Nanowrimo or Inktober attempts
• Needs programming, art, and sound

Devote at least 1 hour per day

Mustering the willpower to discipline myself. This will be hard.

Avoiding the school project crunch a week before the deadline.

Concerns

Time management

No experience means I don’t have any idea on how long anything takes. 1hr/day budget tells me nothing about how to scope.

Sound

Music + effects usually play a large part in game experience. Bad music + effects is probably worse than nothing.

I can find copyright-free sources if necessary, but I’d like to do everything myself.

Theme

BUG!

Your challenge, should you choose to accept it, is to create a game between now and December 1 incorporating the theme somehow. After a few weeks of playing and rating the games by participants, the winners will be announced shortly thereafter.

As usual, you may interpret ‘BUG’ however you wish …

BUG (/bəɡ/)

noun

an insect or creepy crawly an unexpected defect, fault, flaw, or imperfection in code or equipment a microorganism (such as a bacterium or virus) causing illness or disease a concealed listening device a sudden enthusiasm a river in Ukraine

verb

to bother or annoy or pester to plant a listening device to “bug off” or “bug out”

Or go rogue and ignore the dictionary:

B.U.G acronyms e.g. Being Unusually Good or Big Urban Game or something Dad jokes / puns like deterants / tick tock / spelling bee / flywheel

Note: Nobody’s judging the code quality, so lots of bugs are both expected and accepted. Focus on having fun 😉

Brainstorming

Anything; mechanics, aesthetics, narrative, etc.

• Bug-girls. I’m a degenerate weeb.
• Platformer like Cavestory with a bug AI companion (Curly Brace but with more interaction mechanics)
  • Platformers are everybody’s first game right?
• Puzzle game based around actual bugs (off by one, integer overflow, etc.)
  • Seems obvious? And hard to consider fun mechanics that isn’t actually programming…
• Strategy game with warring tribes of bugs
• Something glitchy
  • Gnosia “bugs” destroying the universe
  • OOT/Mario64 speedruns. Wall clips, hovering, ISG, BLJ, etc.
  • Static effects
  • 4th wall breaks

All together?

A bug girl RPG with programming-bug battle mechanics and speedrunner-bug power ups. You are a sentient logic bug trying to escape her game and the antagonist is the programmer adding new code to squash you.

Why an RPG? For the aesthetic of bugs, without actual bugs.

• Attempting to control non-buggy wall clips or infinite speed glitches seems ripe for actual bugs in movement-based games (like a platformer).
• It seems simple to play with things like integer overflow or null pointer exceptions via scripted turn-based attacks (whether as a gimmick or actual mechanic like over-healing to kill)
• Simple over world movement /w “bug” power-ups allows controlled puzzle-like interactions (instead of “cut” in pokemon you can “no clip” through a bush)

I guess this is fine scope for the game jam?

• Systems: overworld map, turn-based battle engine, cutscenes/text boxes
• Art assets: grid-based terrain, simple backgrounds, walking character, as many battle characters as possible, interface
• Sound assets: overworld music + battle music + dramatic cutscene music, hit sound effects, power-up effects
• Can be scaled up or down in scope depending on progress. # of enemies, # of powerups, locales, story, etc.

Good enough for me. We’ll find out if I regret this in 30 days or less.

Progress

• Thought a bit about the theme and wrote this update
• Setup the Github project + pages
  • Past experience is with Gitlab and Gitlab Pages, so need to learn a bit about Github + pages
  • New to Jekyll for SSG, installed and tried the bare minimum. I messed it up and need to further configure

TODO

• Figure out how to make Unity play nice with Git
• Start doing things. Whims will decide whether I work on game design, programming, art, or sound on a given day

Time Spent

0 + 2.5hr