Game Jam Start!

Exciting stuff! This is my upcoming entry to the Sondering Emily x Juliestrator Jam, my first Game Jam here on itch.io in some time. While my goal is primarily to make and finish a game, I'm also trying to use this opportunity to force myself to post more devlogs, something I'm notorious for neglecting.

Concept:

The theme of the game is "home", and I decided to run with the first concept that came to me since it's such a short jam; basically it will be a logic puzzle game where you drop little dormice families into empty houses. You have to place each dormouse into a room with their stuff, and most dormice will be sharing a room, so you have to place them with family members they can tolerate.  I based this idea on my personal experience with the idea of "home"; for most of my life I've had to cohabitate with strangers, and negotiating that can be tricky. Originally it was going to be about placing mice in a dorm, but I was worried that wouldn't fit the theme. So now it's just a big family of mice in one house!

Progress:

Because so much of the game relies on grid placement, I built a small prototype to make sure I can get that to work. I am happy with it so far!

Apparently there's a cool way you can do grid placement using ds_grids, but since I didn't have time to learn that I did some simple janky math to get the dormouse to align with a grid any time it was picked up or dropped.  (by the way, I'll be referring to the mice characters as dormice so I don't get them mixed up with the desktop mouse. So confusing!)

The dormouse can also check what it is being dropped on, so two objects can't be dropped on top of eachother.

The last thing I'm going to do tonight is bang out my to-do list for the next 48 hours. Tomorrow I'm going to a convention with a friend, so I'll have even LESS time to work on this thing! hope I can finish it in time!

1 Day 21 Hours To Go...

• ✅come up with concept
• ✅build basic prototype
• ✅get working dormouse object
• 🐭get working furniture object
• 🐭have dormice express opinions (missing stuff, unhappy with roommate, happy with room)
• 🐭concept out 5 levels
• 🐭get prototype of level 1 working
• 🐭build out 5 levels
• 🐭have finished level transition into next
• 🐭start screen
• 🐭end screen
• 🐭music/sounds
• 🐭pixel art of everything
• 🐭quick bug test
• 🐭quick polish pass