Hi ! This is a devlog describing my and my composer B4RO's journey on this game jam

Firstly, a bit about time management

My first "time blocking" drafts look absolutely insane, mostly because I wasn't thinking of showing them also, them being written in a mix of English and Ukrainian doesn't help too, I think (*￣▽￣*)ブ So here's a (not so much) cleaner plan that I made a day or two into the project where I understood the scope of the project better

One common theme across the drafts is that I like to leave the last day of the jam empty. Of course it's not actually going to be this way but planning it out like this gives space for critical bug fixing (I swear I can count to 10, no, really)

Now onto the following 10 days

Day 1:

First day of a jam was almost as stressful to me as the last, I operated under the idea that it's better to start crunching now than at the end of the jam where the time limit feels much more daunting and discouraging. That actually helped a ton, and saved me from complete burn out.

So I began brainstorming and making sketches, I thought about a game where you make a weapon from scrap. Why would you do that ? Well someone is holding you hostage and is making you do that. Who ? A comically pathetic villain who didn't steal anything more substantial than a ridiculous number of absolutely random stuff. Also you are playing as a scientist (because, you know, villain kidnapping the scientist trope) and to make the game more exciting (and to get back on the guy who kidnapped you) the player will then fight the minions of the main boss, and after some levels, fight the boss himself. In the original concept there were supposed to be a corridor from a manufacturing room leading to the next level, I hoped to make the villain speak to the scientist in person on the start of each gunsmithing segment, and then a cutscene where the villain leaves would play out, before leaving you to mess with the resources. I had to cut that out due to time constraints, and replaced the cutscene with just the villain talking through the speakers. Also, you were originally supposed to make several guns at each gunsmithing segment, and use the three of the guns with different effects to fight different types of enemies, but again, due to time constraints I had to simplify that to just one enemy type and one gun per level.

on the same day I made two concepts, of the scientist and the villain

Scientist was looking a bit too much like Rick from Rick and Morty so I had to change their design a bit (￣▽￣)"

On the same day I made first models of the two, along with animations

I am a 3D modeler by profession so that didn't take too long

Also, I made a list of needed tracks for the composer and B4RO made the first track for the game. Unfortunately this is the only track that didn't get to the final build of the game, as it was intended for the menu's which were cut out of the final version due to time constraints.

Day 2

On the second day I was drafting a system for combining the parts, and how that would result in any kind of weapon

Special thanks to my younger and older brothers for helping me brainstorm the ideas :D !

Also please ignore me calling binky a "blinky" I was too lazy to check

Then I made models of all the parts

You can notice a box here, that was the one ingredient I had to cut out (as always, due to time constraints)

Also this was the first day I started making a crafting system. I made drag and drop  and modeled some more models for the stages of combining the parts (i will quickly realize that this is a bad idea)

Composer B4RO made the first Battle soundtrack and the villain soundtrack (that plays during the boss fight)

Day 3

Third day was fully sacrificed to making a crafting system. I scrapped the idea of preloading the models with stages of mixing because I would obviously have mixing between more than 2 parts, and making a separate model for each instance would be kinda crazy. Instead I made scaling and blackening (later turned to reddening) reactions through code, and the mesh modifications were done by adding the "reaction result" mesh to the bullet scene and hiding it, to un-hide in case of the corresponding collision. 

And B4RO finished the last 3 tracks that were needed for the game, losing sound, winning sound and (my personal favorite) soundtrack for the weapon creation.

Day 4

I was still finishing up the crafting system and made a weapon maker model with animation. Also made first sketches of levels that I will make

As well as a plan for what kind of ingredients will be available to the player at every stage. 

Now, this kind  of level planning would play a cruel joke with me later, because from the top down view it looks great, but I did not realize that, paired with the third person camera, these tight corridors would create inconveniences for the player. That's amplified by the web build having a camera that is somehow worse to manage then windows/linix build camera (i still need to investigate this)

5th Day I had to spend working on my orders :(

Day 6 

I started working on the shooting, first I implemented the saving of the bullet mesh when you place it in the weapon making machine, and then spawning that mesh when you shoot bullets on a second scene. I also made the mistake of being too lazy to make a normal animation tree for the character (i struggle a lot with them in Godot) so I made two versions of the player, a fighter and non-fighter. One would have shooting animations and another one just walking. That would backfire because I later realized that the player would probably want to check the bullet effect before getting into battle, and due to my camera setup, I can't just re-spawn the main character without the player noticing. So I had to rebuild the player animation handling and combine the player versions into one. I knew it was not a good practice from the start, still did it and then had to start over, classic indie developer move. Also made the enemy model

Day 7

Added some primitive ai to enemies along with health and vfx from the bullets hitting them. VFX were made by following these two super good Godot tutorials

And added dummies for testing the weapons, by just giving them a short version of an enemy bullet detection script.

Also, I realized maybe another soundtrack for the battles wouldn't hurt, and B4RO helped me out by making another one.

Day 8

Finally got to the level creation, for the decorations, floor and walls I used this beautiful pack https://kaylousberg.itch.io/prototype-bits some parts just weren't the right color or pattern that i'd like to use, and some I wanted to change fundamentally so I modified them using Blender and GIMP. As an example, here's the comparison between the original texture, that was used for all of the assets in the original kit, and the one I had in the final build of the game.

 Day 9

Now it's finishing touches, I added the tv and made renders of the villain  for them, and a little script that would randomly show one of the frames

In addition to regular frames, there's a 0.05% chance to get secret 3 frames in a row of... another villain

I'm still not sure if anyone got this easter egg because so far, nobody mentioned it in the reviews, but here's the frames:

Made a very simple dialogue system (if you could even call it that) and some additional furnishing to the manufacturing room to sell the idea (speakers in the corner, tv, etc.) + added breakable chains on the door, so that there was a way to meaningfully prevent players from going into the battle without guns (you break the chain by shooting it), wrote the dialogue (or monologue ? he can't hear us anyway soo) and renders of the scientist and speakers for the icons.

I was planning on adding the menu's and stuff but I quickly ran into a bigger problem that almost gave me a heart attack.

Day 10

I make final fixes. Export the web build. Upload it to the itch.io page. 

And half the scripts are not working.

Including the most important - creating weapons.

Now, thankfully I still had 18 hours until the delivery, so I started fixing. Turns out, the fixes were fairly simple, and all of the bugs were present in the windows build as well, so I was able to export the game with a debug window and find the core of the issues very quickly. First problem was dependencies, some path's had to be starting with user:/ not res:/, some issues were just missing scripts that some other scripts still called ( I don't know how it didn't break the game in the editor too, but ok). And after fixing all of them I was finally at peace. Until I entered the battle levels. They were so insanely laggy, the game was unplayable. 

So, it turns out there's two vfx nodes in Godot, CPU and GPU, well, in most instances you should use the GPU one. Except for web builds, they need CPU based vfx nodes. And unfortunately there was no easy way to just convert them in the editor so I just remade all of the vfx again. 

After that was done the game stopped lagging when you shoot enemies and dummies, but enemy levels were still laggy.

I tried the first logical solution, which is - remove some enemies. And, well, it worked. So I started removing enemies from each level one by one until they stopped lagging on my pc. I went through SO many web builds. I exported every version with a number at the end to differentiate, when number got to 10 I deleted the builds from the folder and started again, I went through like 30 passes until I got the non-laggy build. Well, on my pc that is, after I got some reviews about the game still lagging I tested the web build on my other pc and found out that the levels still lag until you kill an enemy or two (too late to fix that at that point).

Soo after I got, what I thought, was the perfect iteration of the build I uploaded it, made a cover (rendered models in Blender and edited the cover in GIMP), wrote the description and submitted. And went to sleep (at 9 am)

That's it ! Thank you for reading this far, I really appreciate that. Sorry for the grammatical mistakes if you found any. 

I learned so much from this jam and it got me very excited for other game jams that I might participate in ヾ(≧ ▽ ≦)ゝ