HELLO WORLD.

Well, here goes!  I've been playing around with GameMaker Studio for about a month and was starting to make some things on my own, and BAM - My First Game Jam comes to my attention.  I figured my first prototype attempt KARNBADOX could wait a little while and I'd take a shot at joining this jam and seeing what I could come up with under a 2 week deadline, and have my first finished game under my belt by the end of July!  I'll be using this devlog to not only provide updates for my pals that want to see progress, but also just to help gather my thoughts and have something to look back on someday.  

A few days before the jam that I decided to make a very simple single screen arcade style shooter (Galaga), as I figured I could write the code for it fairly quickly and still have enough time to polish the sound and art a bit.  When the jam's optional theme of "Change" was announced, I had the thought to make the player mutate with various power-ups as the game progresses through a polluted underground sewer canal oozing with radioactive energy and creatures.

And from the sewers emerges..... POLLUTANT MUTANT

The first two days of development were pretty interesting.  To further experiment with this entire process I also decided to live stream the development on my Twitch channel which I found to have some pros and cons, which I'll get into later.  On day one I was able to get the player moving and shooting, waves of enemies spawning and slowly drifting towards the player, and a boss fight with a giant mutant rat barfing turtle shells.  Day two led to starting to work on the power up mutation system, a speed up (third leg), a dual gun attack, and a randomly spreading shotgun blast, along with starting to set up the power up selection phase after the boss fight.  As something kind of quirky and hopefully easy to code, the power up is to be selected and explained by shooting at it, then shooting at an OK icon in order to obtain it and move onto the next stage.  I quickly discovered the shotgun's randomized trajectory would make this selection process near impossible, so for now it switches back to default gun at that screen. I think I'll need to rethink something there in general though.  And for whatever reason coding the random shotgun blast projectiles was breaking my brain and took way longer than it should have, which has me considering replacing it with something else anyway.

Live streaming the development was generally fun, I especially had a good time laughing at the goofy looking prototype sprites I was quickly throwing in the game, and also got a lot of great help with my code and some cool ideas from chat.  On the downside I also found myself to get a bit distracted and struggled with focused and coherent thought when it came to dealing with more abstract concepts of programming.  Those moments certainly made me consider if streaming not only was affecting my productivity, but also if this really had much entertainment value or not.  Not to mention the always fun CRIPPLING SELF DOUBT that any creative person deals with on a regular basis, but this is the first time I've taken up a new craft and quickly placed my learning process out on display for anyone to watch live.  And sometimes I would feel a bit bad when people in chat would try and help me with something, but their code/explanations weren't always making much sense to me since my experience with all of this is so limited.  Of course I know my friends will probably support my endeavors regardless, but moving forward for this week I will probably work on the rest of the game code offline, and come back to streaming this stuff when it's time for the sprite art creation and music/sound production. 

For day 3 (today), once I'm done sharing this devlog (writing this is basically procrastinating isn't it?) I'm planning to review the code from the last couple days and take a little time to add some comments if I can remember what I was doing.  Another downside of streaming was I felt the need to move things along quickly and I did not take enough time to keep my code well organized and explained.  Beyond that, the next few items to work on will probably be finishing up the power up selection, setting up the foundations for levels 2 & 3, and maybe starting to give the enemies a bit more movement and behaviors.  I'll try to post here daily with how things are progressing!