Making a Game in Five Days – Part 2
Time for the second devlog of my GMC Jam 57 entry, called “Let me just use this for a second”. As revealed in yesterday’s devlog the theme of the jam is Something Borrowed.
In my entry, which we’ll call LMJUTFAS for short, you control a little dude who can pick up anything that isn’t nailed down and move it or use it.
As you can see in the screenshot above, you can even pick up this little dog and carry it around! So far there are two items programmed into the game that you can move around or use – a dog and a turnip. But the back end is so simple that all I need to do is add more sprites and a tiny bit of code per item… so I’m hoping to have LOTS of them in the final game!
You’ll also notice that I’ve done a bunch of tiles and some level design for the world map. You can see the whole thing in the GameMaker editor in the screenshot below:
The middle and right-hand side of the map are broadly finished, but as you can see the south-western side of the map is pretty bare. None of the collisions are done yet and there’s no actual content – but I wanted to flesh out the world first and add the interactive objects all at once later!
So far making this overworld took me a few hours today. I’m going to continue programming new objects and NPCs this evening and tomorrow and the game will start to feel a lot more interactive.
But what’s the actual goal of the game? I hear you ask. I’ve decided on a fairly straight forward goal. Mostly the fun of the game will revolve around using the world as a big sandbox and seeing how objects interact with each other in silly ways. I know a lot of people will want to see an “end” point though, especially during a game jam. So there will be 4 elemental statues dotted around the map which you must bring back to the starting point to finish the game.
The elemental statues will all be locked behind puzzles that require borrowing several items. So the spirit of the theme and the mechanics of the game will be respected, but the selling point really will be the chaotic side quests and other interactions you can perform besides the main puzzles.
I hope you’re excited to play it!
