Jam devlog - Calm before the storm

Watch the video for the German version or just enjoy the gameplay clips.

When I saw the announcement for the beginning of Brackeys Game Jam 2024.2, it was half an hour old. I had specifically joined the discord for the jam and had forgotten about it... Welp, lets check the conditions: whole week, theme "Calm before the storm". Okay. There was no way I could make time on weekdays. It was the kids' first week in school and we're moving. The only day I could make time was that first day of the jam. After short hesitation, I got to work. Brainstorming time!

Lunch time. Brainstorming is slow. I had to write down quite a few bad ideas before they started combining to something worthwhile: Warning villagers that a storm is coming. Actually I thought it was too obvious, but I had an idea how to make it in time with simple shapes, so there we go!

I drew the shapes in Affinity Designer, went back to Godot and set up a tile map I had used similarily in a protottype before. The level design layer had all terrains and a script moved them to a list of terrain layers, so that I only had to draw terrain-to-transparency tiles in the tileset.

The houses were triangles in three colors. I made the quadratic villagers children of their houses. That way, they had the same color and I could write the script so that they go to zero when warned. They'd end up in the house entrance, which I declared being fine.

Y-sorting was an issue for all of development. Every time I encountered a bug, I found an object that didn't have y-sorting enabled. I wish it had an "inherit" option so you only had to enable it in some parent node.

Shouting the warning wasn't an issue, but somehow the RigidBody2D wasn't detected as body. I played around with collision layers until I just made the villagers a StaticBody2D to make it work and move on. In the end, I had it working with RigidBody2D, but don't ask me how.

For making the villagers return to their houses, I used tweens. I really learn to love them. Order them to move,forget about them. Rad. I chained a callback counting the rescued people once they finished returning, encountered a bug where you could warn the same person multiple times... All in all smooth programming.

So I had the core loop finished and it didn't play terrible, great.

It was evening and I noticed that I had not planned for half the features. Like, blending to black when the storm began, showing the available time, showing villager counts... I explored global variables for the first time and they almost immediately just worked. Adding story was a last minute idea and the multiple endings were a midnight idea. Playtesting, making four versions and finally I had a working submission.

I'm quite proud I managed to make something playable in 13 hours.

Have fun playing!