Bob now plays cards with you on a moving car!

In the past few hours in my gmtk game jam game I have succesfully polished the main blackjack game. meanwhile my teammate has been working on shops, between scenes.

This doesnt mean there was no struggle

I have banged my head a couple of times on my desk trying to figure out how to order every signal and event in the correct order.

Bob was being a bit quiet

So i let him be able to talk, well kind of ragebait the player This dialogue system is definetly one of the more favorite ones I have made, mainly because of how fast I was able to make it.

Instead of making the next text function replace the entire current text that is displayed, I instead use a string Array to keep all the requested dialogues, where if there are no dialogues when adding to the array, I create a while loop untill I run out of dialogue strings, letting me handle multiple messags from different components all at the same time without even a chance of anything going wrong.

I had given the game to a friend to playtest

Understood that it is very hard to know what you are supposed to do (they got stuck not knowing what to do), that is why my main priority is going to be a polished tutorial, so people do not get stuck in the first 3 minutes.

There are only around 22 hours left in the jam Will it be possible for this games team of 2 to finish in time, yes, but very rough, so this game will have to be polished a bit after submission to the jam.

Comment your gmtk game jam games so I can check them out

Say hi to BOB

This year I am participating in a gamejam in the GMTK game jam. Now the theme is kind of not my favorite

(trauma from making timed games)

You might be asking who is Bob, well he is the green alien in the picture, idk I think it makes sense.

Game idea:

So this year to keep it simple, taking inspiration from balatro and gamble with your friends, you get stuck in the desert and you are missing 5$ for a bus ticket
but
Bob here decides here is going to give you a lift, but you must pay him for every km you drive,

you dont have money

but you can get it by playing blackjack against him.

Who said it was gonna be fair?

Appart from the regular blackjack implementation, I have added cheating and items both to increase your chances of surviving.

(Yes surviving, dont run out of cash)

Sometimes Bob gets a bit distracted, during those moments you have the chance to cheat….

Or if you are fancy, use your items to do a load of powerful effects.

Progress

Progress is a bit slow, since gmtk game jam ends in like 2 days, but I think this is possible, godot signals have become my best friend to keep everything ordered correctly in all the scripts.

This is definetly my best code for a game jam yet.

If any of you is working on the GMTK game jam, comment your projects!

User interface designers are underrated

I had never paid much attention to how apps look, but now making my first mobile application, I realise how important it is, the fact that the styling is very similar to css (I hate css) is useful for simplicity, but I have a bias from so many small mistakes that take hours to fix. Apps need the user interface to effectively tell the user what each button does, or to put attention into the main aspect. Most people would not look twice if an apps design is bad.

New stuff

• Finally implemented the possibility to change time between new compliment generating

• Bunch of bug fixing

• And most importantly: The interface

Because this is my first mobile app I must say the starting design code sucks, so I have been stuck at slowly rewriting old systems so they actually work with all the needed features. For the interface I have to rewrite the entire styleSheet for it to look okay.

Hope that I can finally release soon, and not into 99 more bugs

IOS development is impossible

maybe exaggerating a bit, but from all of my reserch i have found out that you need a mac or IOS device to be able to test IOS, now I do not have one of those .-.

What does this mean:

I am not gonna be releasing a IOS widget, because of not being able to make it high quality, let alone test it

Instead I am gonna release it as a android app, and if it gets enough requests, add IOS support

Now what have I done instead

• Had to remake the file hierarchy.

• Customization with themes for the widget and app design.

• File sharing and uploading.

I am afraid to say I am a bit ashamed of how long it has taken for me to fix simple mistakes.

Customization

One of the most important parts about a widget is being able to customize it, now that is using custom themes, maybe it would be a cool addition to let people able to make custom themes, but will have to see

I HAVE A WIDGET

I am overly happy because it just did not appear for 2 hours because I thought some line from the documented example was just a “random comment” "use no memo";. Now reading back it makes so much sense. I was insanely wrong. Adding it fixed the entire widget .-.

also this widget -> only for android.

and I can only hope making a ios one wont break the android one.

on another note

having to balance async and sync functions is a pain. had to rewrite my entire data saving system to be able to handle getting it synchronously. While doing so also found a nice tool to save data synchronously. Should I rewrite my data handling to only use one way to save data, probably but for now it works, when I get to the optimizations part and code cleaning that should get sorted.

Overall

must say it is a nice feeling when using some new language finding so many new tools while making a simple project, in the moment -> “Wow my headache could have been easily avoided”, but good to know the next project will be 10x faster.

Not too much left to make:

• IOS widget

• Widget customization

• Polish the app

But it is probably gonna take a good amount of time still.

Making phone applications is actually way more fun than expected

okay it was partly because I switched to a new framework which makes everything more comfortable.

had to rewrite all the file reading and writing, but it was 100% worth it.

Now the only main thing left is the widget itself

after only making my phone overheat multiple times, got the timer system working for a random compliment to appear every xx amount of time.

The app is coming togheter well, only

• widget

• styling (Pain😭)

• improving user experience

is left

I wanted to learn how to make phone apps, so my idea is to make a widget app, that every day displays a random compliment from a big list.

Fighting with github and emulators was not fun to even start developing, but luckly was able to get all that sorted out.

Was it easier after then, no, never developed something like this, everything looks so alien. Thankfully documentation exsists.

I want the user to be able to make custom compliment lists, and add his own, so I started by making a system where you can create your own compliment lists, add compliments into them, and then they get saved in the apps data as a json file.

hopefully adding the widget will not be too hard.

I NEED YOUR HELP

I have no idea how fun my game is. So after thinking for a bit, i have thrown together a downloadable demo for people to play test.

The game is a chaotic speedrunning game, where you have to do mini tasks while taking care of your annoying cat. If that is something that catches your attention any type of feedback is appreciated.

Check out the game at
https://duc-k.itch.io/keep-morro-happy
(Warning: the difficulty is very unbalanced)

My little game is finally about to release in a few days.

Finaly finished all of the possible tasks in the game, the art needs to be reworked, but that will be left for the final end (I suck at art)

Also the gameplay loop has been finished with an ending screen that evaluates if you have compleated all the tasks your parents left. On to the last stretch.

While making this I have realised games with a timer instead of a set goal are very very hard to make. I am now impressed by people who are able to make them.

Almost have completed my small game about speedrunning chores before your parents get back home, all while taking care of you annoying cat.

it took waaaay too long to have finished and fully polished one of the minigames you have to do. Only 3 more left :/.

Will this game end up being fun? Will have to find out.

For now i have implemented character movement, map generation, both cat movement, “prototypes” of 5 tasks you will have to do, item system.