Making a Game in Five Days – Part 1

Yesterday marked the beginning of the 57th GMC Jam, and I’m entering a game! I thought it would make a great case study for a series of posts here, so that you can learn how I’m making a game in such a short time frame.

The Ideas Phase

.During the first few hours of the jam I did some brainstorming. The theme was revealed to be “Something Borrowed“, which I immediately knew I wanted to use mechanically, rather than just in the game’s story.

Ad you can see from the pictures above, what I’ve come up with is a game called “Let me just use that for second“. It will be a kind of sandbox adventure game where you can roam around an open world picking up objects and using them for things.

I basically want it so that the player can pick up, move and use any object that isn’t rooted to the floor. These objects will then interact with each other in interesting ways when the player puts them next to each other.

At the moment, I actually don’t have an idea for the “point” of the game, the objective that players will aim for. I want the silly mechanical stuff to be done first, and I’ll think of the “why am I even doing this” afterwards.

First Steps in the Project

As with most games I make these days, it helps to load in a few universal scripts that I use for all projects. These wouldn’t take long to write from scratch, probably less than an hour, but there’s no point rewriting them every time. These scripts do things like detecting controller presses, playing the audio and setting up save files.

I did change the way I do save files for this particular project. Since the whole world will be full of objects you can pick up and put down, I’m using JSON to store “flags” for them instead of using INI files. It should allow me to just give object a name and have it read or write its own information to the JSON when it needs to. Basically, I won’t have to keep updating a script that writes to an ini file every time I make a new object.

The Game Play Itself

Finally I could get started on the game play itself! So far I’ve made just a handful of scribbly sprites of a main character walking around, which I did with my drawing tablet in GameMaker’s sprite editor. I also made a little turnip the guy can lift up.

At the moment he can walk around, lift things and even “use” them – the code for the game is very simple and he can already “do” everything he should be able to do. However, there is only one object to do anything with at the moment and it’s a pretty useless turnip!

For more progress on my jam entry keep an eye out for my devlogs over the next few days 🙂