30 Days and 30 Nights.

Well, another day another game jam. I really liked the format of this jam: 'One Hour a Day'. It lent itself to us oldies that might just have a bit too much going on in life and can't commit to the "48 hour" weekend-warrior-style of most game jams. In addition, it was the inaugural jam created by a first time hoster (CoffeeSpiller), they did a great job running it considering it was their first. I'm just going to break this one down in a stream of consciousness fashion:

Theme
I ignored the provided theme 'Stick and Stones'. I felt a little guilty about that, but I had a shooter in my head and just wanted to get something simple on the page and try to polish it up as much as possible. Twin-stick shooter tutorials were plenty on the internet and so that was that. I did have some initial ideas involving 'Sticks and Stones' though - I thought a rhythm game where you 'cursed' at your opponent (in reference to 'words will never hurt me'). But yeah, far beyond my current skill level and I'd have to write music. Yeech.

Okkto
There was no conscious thought behind 90% of the choices here. My initial build used the default Godot icon for the player/enemies/walls. At some point when I had to rough in graphics I tried a few things: A space ship, a little dude, etc. I was running out of time and really am not great at detailed pixel art or anything like that so I just drew a little Octogon. At this point the Geometry Wars clone was pretty much set in stone. The 'Octo' thing worked well though, the player shoots in 8 different directions, moves in 8 directions. Why not.

Lessons
I have to thank an individual in the Discord (Jasontherand) for helping me out with Object Oriented Programming. Specifically, writing my own classes/subclasses and giving me concrete examples of how to do it with an enemy class. I completely get it now and while there are a few tutorials on the web on how to do this in Godot I swear I'll take the time out to make my own - even if it's just so I can reference it myself! It was a huge learning for me and things like weapons, levels, enemies will be so much easier in the future.

Next
I really like what I have going here as a base of the game. The 'game juice' with most of the sounds/explosions feel right. The code is pretty fresh in my head so I'd like to keep jamming on this one a bit every day. Here's my not-in-any-order "roadmap":

• Change enemy spawning completely: Currently I've hard coded each enemy/wave. I'd like to change it to an 'endless' system that ramps up by itself.

• Add weapons: The single 'buster beam' is essentially a mid-tier place holder for now. I'd like the player to start with an underpowered pea-shooter and slowly work up into becoming a vehicle of doom.

• Add enemies: The current enemy set was designed on the fly with little thought. There isn't much difference between them aside from speed/hitpoints. I'd also like to have different behavior for crowding/kinematics so they don't all log-jam each other (though that's kinda fun too)
• Experience or Collectable system: Right now the 'gold' collected doesn't do much. I'd like it to fill up a bar and when the bar fills X happens.
• Look into making the 'world' a map instead of a single Arena so there is a bit more of a 'journey' for the player.

Alright, thanks for reading and thanks again to CoffeeSpiller for a great jam! I hope you hold it again soon!