Hello World!

Are you still there? Good. Thanks. This serves twin purposes. It's the first DevLog for Jumpin' Jack, my new in-development mobile game, AND it's an opportunity to test out this distraction-free writing program that I'm also working on.

That one isn't ready, not quite yet. It isn't stable enough, and I don't want people losing work because of me. That'd be devastating.

Anyways, yes sir, this here is a Dev-Log, and these here are logs of my development.

Conception:

About a year ago I started work on this game. I wanted to make a single-screen game that you could play one-handed. Something arcade-y that I could produce in a week or two. I joined a Game Jam, I figured I'd release it by Halloween, how hard could it be?

And here we are a year later, and though I'm proud of the work that I've done and happy with the small mountain I've climbed, the game is still not what I'd call finished. It's certainly playable, which is why I decided that now was the time to release a demo out into the world. However, I still have work left to do before I release a version that I feel comfortable asking money for. Or placing Ads in.

Inception

The initial prototype was built to play like a yo-yo. I wanted the player to control a mass, and I wanted it to have it's own weight and velocity. I craved the responsiveness of one-to-one control, so I made this weight follow the player's finger. I added gravity, so that letting go was also a valuable option for movement.

Later, once the character was decided, the more it wanted to feel like a booger than a yo-yo. I added the option to pull back and release in order to fling the characters upwards as well.

First, you hop, then you bop:

I then drew up designs for the enemies, and learned Godot's animation system, which, once I'd learned how to properly "skin" the meshes of the 2d Sprites, was pretty straight forward.

I'd like to stop and mention here that I've learned, through the process of redesigning and implementing nearly every aspect of this game at one time or another, that designing and maintaining a clean workflow first and foremost is the most important element in a project. Most of my time has been spent refactoring, and restructuring the assets and code from the quick prototypical spaghetti-code that I'd made at the very start.

In that Game Jam fury, I learned from video tutorials and online resources, learning all these piecemeal techniques and ideas, all of which needed huge refactoring once the code scaled from "proof-of-concept" into code that I'd consider "game-ready". After a year-plus of learning Godot I think the game dev community could use more generalized tutorials about game and project structure.

That's my soapbox, anyway.

What's next?

Right now the game has a title screen that transitions directly into gameplay (this is something silly that I'm very proud of), a high-score system with a leaderboard (I'm using SilentWolf, and have much more to learn!), and a system for changing game phases.

There are currently two (TWO!) enemies, one placeholder boss-fight (did you encounter it?), a combo system (that is currently a little (UNLIMTED POWER) broken), and enough collectable candies to make a dentist blush.

The high-score-board, as of this writing, only has my own score on it, which tells me either: I'm the best gamer in the entire world (unlikely), the game is too obscure (perhaps), or that no one has played it.

Heck, it could even be boring. Which is a nice segway into talking about-

Features to come:

Costumes and Power-Ups.

The hole will move and change size, time will be added or removed, candy will fall from the heavens!

I'm conceptualizing a boss fight, and a bonus phase that's entirely about collecting candy and has nothing to do with enemies. The code is there for the phase types, but the actual encounter designs have yet to be finalized.

Music is also coming, and a few more quality of life / juice / polish features, but these will come sporadically throughout development.

As for the next major release, I want to add incentive for player retention, so I'm planing on adding skins by the end of October. I call this the Costume Update, and it will involve spending candy for prizes. I could use input here.

After this, I'll start talking about a 1.0 release, which I'll release on the Play store for free with Ads, after which we can start talking about a new stages and content. I'm (fingers-crossed) hoping to have the game feature-complete by next Halloween (2022) at the absolute latest.

If you're still with me after all that, thank you very much. If you're interested, please give the game a try, and let me know what you think! I'm open to feedback in either direction, as long as there's a way to learn and grow as a developer.

Thanks for your time!

An addendum post demo release:

As has been the case with every other step along the way, uploading the game to Itch came with its own learning opportunities as well:

 Namely:

The HTML5 port:

The best way for people to experience the game is through the web interface. You can just click a button, and immediately play. No installation, no commitment. No trace. The idea is great, but nothing ever works on the first try. The initial upload ran on desktop perfectly. A slightly lower framerate than native hardware, but it was negotiable: You could play the webGL version and have a perfectly acceptable experience. However, when the same was attempted on mobile, it was an entirely different story. On iOS, there was nothing, just a display that reads that the browser didn't support the new webGL standard. I scoffed from my high horse, laughing at Apple's inadequacies, when I tried to show off with my beautiful expensive Pixel 4. I clicked play and it loaded and to my chagrin, the background was completely missing. Blackness where art(?) should be.

This sent me down a rabbit-hole of self-discovery and was such a whirlwind of devastation so harrowing and full of adventure and romance that I won't bore you with it here. Needless to say, I ended up backporting to gles2, and losing some as of yet unreplaced fluff and sparkle. The glowy arcade-y score and rainbow-sparkly particle effect on the candies is now gone forever in favor of a more compatible and platform agnostic project.

All this means is that my game was unplayable to nearly everyone for the first 24 hours that it was advertised as available.

After all that strain (learning!), I was delighted to know that it finally ran on iOS with no issues!

On Android (my baby!) the background was still nothing but blackness.

I had a another full Hero's Journey, made great sacrifices, learned a lot about what it means to really be human, and also that certain Chromium based browsers would just decide that a texture was too large and boot it out of existence. I halved the resolution of my background image and everything finally (finally, finally) worked as it was supposed to two days before.

I now know how to use the dev-console for the Android version of Chrome while I'm logged into the Desktop version of Chrome while my phone is connected via USB-debugging to debug a bug that only appeared in a device-specific use case of a port that I didn't need to a device that I didn't own.

That last part isn't true. I do own a Pixel 4. But what if I didn't? What if I'd spent two days trying to get the HTML5 version working on an iPhone? Do you see how dangerous this is? We're crazy people!

True to form, each step forward in one way is two steps back in another, but we're learning from this. Now we know.

NOW we know.

:P