I added 50+ upgrades to the game

A deck contains 52 cards. I wanted each upgrade to be a card, but I could not decide which of the cards to use, so I decided to make them all be used.

Here my way of making upgrades came in extremely handy, As it makes it easier to make a lot of them. Still it takes a while, but then playing it myself, it is worth it just to end up with multiple upgrade paths to go to. Either buff small cards or buff high cards. It is the players choice. Should also add diversity to the strategies that can be used to get onto the leaderboard.

SFX and music

Managed to add SFX and music to the game, it truly livens the game up a lot. It is impressive how much just music and SFX can make.

Other small changes

• story mode ending screen small touch ups.
• game balancing, scaling formulas.
• a bunch of small color changes, small variable tweaks

(Warning laggy video with 0 audio )

I gave Bob a gun

Now obviously Bob is not happy if you loose a round. So you might be able to guess what happens.

Added a loose animation

new additions

• Made Bob speak in more areas, as well as random speech at random times

• Screenshake (The game feels way better just from this one feature)

• Made a transition controller

• Finished the story ending scene

Devlog X

Action bar redesign

Gave the buttons some color, as well as gave more of the labels stretching and scaling

Transportation modes

Having only a car as a mode of transport is a bit boring. So I added a boat section and a train. Is it very extra, yes.

For the story mode, made the story starting scenes visual designs. simplified some of the code.

New perlin noise shader

The last perlin noise shader I made was very laggy, so I made a new one for the water, and that fixed all the lag issues

A public leaderboard

I have not ever tried to add a public leaderboard to a game, but it was more pleasant than I expected. I took some of my old code to quickly make a js node application, using sequelize to handle the backend. Then set up everything to a Render web service and postgress database. Then connected godot to the web service and it works!

When loosing in the endless mode you will be prompted if you wish to submit your score to the database, and if you are top 10, you will show up on the main menu.

A small intro.

The jam version had a very long intro, I remade it to have a way shorter one, so when trying the game over and over, it is not a hastle to wait through the tutorial.

Bobs shop is officially open

Buy upgrade cards after rounds to be able to beat even harder rounds. The goal is going to be to make it to the furthest level possible. And then flex on others with a level leaderboard.

Main features I managed to make

• A very nice upgrade card system, which lets me make new cards insanely easily. (I love dictionaries) I can make each upgrade store its own function, then make custom new functions at will.

• Card buying and then displaying on 2D. As well as popping up when their special function is met

• Reroll buttons

The game is starting to come togheter. Today I have woken up sick. because of it I probably won’t be able to finish in my own set time limit, but that is normal in game development, to plan less time than it would actually take.

Video is a bit laggy

Welcome to Bobs shop

I have made the shop cards, only have the buying left to add and make a bunch of custom card functions.

Obviously made the cards stretch and pop around.

gameplay loop

The gameplay loop is almost done already. I added the button to start next round, which now means the player can go on forever, as long as they get enough score each round

There is a fun “feature” of text and cards becoming huge, that I will showcase in the next devlog

Enviornment changes

I realised the previous deep fog was a bit too much. So I gave bob a new skybox, so he does not have to live in darkness.

Also a bunch more visual improvements. More buttons squatch and stretch. Optimized some code, where for some reason I was running the same code in 3 different spots, combined all that into just 1 function.

Next I will start working on the shop, originally started a 2d shop, but realised I want to keep the 3d cards, so instead I am a 3d shop.

I love polish

The most important part of an incremental game is polish.

So in the video, you can a load of the basics. Particles, Rotation, scaling. Numbers.

I will have to improve this system further, but currently I already like how it feels.

Cash calculating

Currently I only have amount and multiplier. It is a bit inspired by balatro, I want to differenetiate a bit by trying to make it be more the players choice of possible combos. Instead of having some multiplier based on poker hands, each card shall do something. and each upgrade, either buffs a specific card, or lets the player themselves make combinations, for example, if your card sum is 10, get 3x the cash.

more additions

• Added card selecting/unselecting
• added hand playing

Got a load of feedback about the game

Bob is back!

After getting a lot of feedback, I have realised what could be improved in the game, so I have decided to improve the game a bit, and try implement some stuff that I did not get to in the short GMTK game jam time frame

but what is the fun if there is no challenge?

So I have decided to attempt to finish all the game improvements in 50 hours of real world time (2 days)

Current changes

• From the feedback, the 3d world buttons sometimes were hard to spot, so I moved them to be 2d.

• Also I have started to clean up some of the spaghetti code that was made when speedrunning this game in such a short time frame

• Made the cards order themselves based on values

Idea that I want to implement

I want to make the game be more like and incremental, and have a lot of customization.

The idea is every card does something else, and between levels you get to buy upgrades, that change what each specific card does.

Bob is succesfully a part of the gmtk game jam

After having to rush the game, too big files and multiple game breaking bugs we managed to fix everything in time!

The problems:

Couple hours before submission I wanted to add a arrow to guide the player that they do not get lost. Now I tried for an entire hour to do some complex vector math, after giving up my teammate just found that there is the godot look_at() function o_o. Fun waste of an important hour.

• Game breaking bugs -> Scenes crashing, money doesnt reset when you restart the game (You would be stuck at 0 all the time), items dont get used up

Now luckly they were all quite easy to fix, but then also, since this was a game jam we decided to use some premade assets. We ended up having a lot that we did not use in the directory, and then we found out itch allows only 200mb files for web games, we were almost double that. Well swing swing half the files deleted

The game contents

• A small story scene in the beginning and end of game

• Playing cards against Bob ( Do anything you must to win)

• mainmenu, settings, ending screen

• tutorial, which hopefully explains the gameplay good enough

overall

We have stuff to work on, spaghetti code is something that can always improve, our modeling skills. Try not to rush everything in the end, but I am proud of our progress in this game jam, even more with the fact this was our first 3d game jam. I think this game needs a little bit more polish before being worthy of a stardance ship, so its gameplay shall be perfected after the suggestions from the jam voters.

try out the jam version at https://duc-k.itch.io/cashless-drive

If you also made a gmtk game jam game, drop a link to it in the comments for me to try out

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!