I had a little time before work started today so I added my little omnipresent NPC character to give little hints on where to go and what to do next. I think game Jam games need to be a little easier than normal games for a couple reasons. 1 - people can get bored fast and shut off a game the moment they are frustrated. 2 - people don't know me as a developer, so they can't trust that I have made a finished game. Because you'll get the occasional unfinished game in a jam, they might not know if there even IS a place to progress to. I would hate someone to stop because they think I didn't finish the game. For this reason, I also want to add in some kind of gate that shows you're making progress every time you collect a costume which would open once all costumes are done and bring you to the final level. That way everyone who starts the game will almost immediately know how long the game is going to be and feel a strong sense of quick progression.

My goals for today once work is finished are as follows:

• Boss artwork and mechanics - Done
• GUI display
• Other random pieces of art
• Final Boss level and starting level
• Gate that teleports you to final level

If I can get those done today I'll be extremely happy. My tentative schedule is the following:

Wednesday:

• Add music and sound effects
• Add costume display cards

Tuesday

• Add menus
• Add an opening cutscene
• Add a bit of dialogue when you first find the boss
• Add a little bit to the Itch.io page so that it can be viewed publicly.

It's 8:30 at night and here my plan for the final battle:

Appear:

Boss appears - timer counts down

Text:

Text appears - timer counts down

Fight:

Fight begins -Turns on final battle. Player gets control back, health bar appears up top. Once boss is out of health

Stagger:

Stagger begins. Main character says hi to finish him off. He turns into a normal person,

Trans:

Screen shakes, fade to white. Go to cutscene.

Early morning day 5:

So I got a lot done yesterday and I think my expectations were a little bit over ambitious. I managed to get the boss looking good and functioning properly. I made him a little bizarro superman clone since his attacks remind me of that a bit.

The gui looks really good and I'm super happy with it! I added in the name of the character so there can be no mistake that copyright infringement is not taking place, and I'm really happy with the little quotes they have as well. I also added a name for their special move so that the player isn't confused. There's an arrow that shows up when they have enough materials for the next costume so there isn't confusion there either. Ultimately none of these were all that hard to program, though the distances for everything are hard baked in there. I'll likely have to make some adjustments when putting on HTML5 for the jam.

I finished the art for just about every object in the game. The portal was trickiest. I originally wanted a center point that a bunch of fuzzy portal things would orbit around, but that ended up being too difficult to code since I couldn't find tutorials to do exactly what I wanted online. What I ultimately ended up doing was just creating a circle like pattern of orbs that shrink and expand every frame to create some instability. I added glowing light in the center and made the whole thing rotate. Then I made it shift through all the colors between a random range of about 200 and 240 rgb which gave it a little more unstable look. If I knew how to use shaders, I would probably have something that looks a lot better than this, but I think it's fine for the jam. I still have to make it appear when the final costume is purchased and teleport you to the final boss, but that shouldn't be hard at all.

The final boss was one of the things I was most nervous about because it combines 2 things I've almost never coded before: enemy AI and cutscenes. I started out making a state machine for the cutscene to transition between everything, but after going through a few states, I realized that there was a much simpler way. I just put what I wanted to happen when an alarm triggers, including starting the next alarm. It adds a good sense of time to the cutscene which I love, though I added a line that triggers the current alarm if a button is pressed for debugging purposes. I know some people like to skip cutscenes and get to the gameplay, but I feel this game is so short that I don't want you skipping through the ending. You can't lose the final battle, so the cutscenes are really just to add a sense of catharsis when you get to bash the bully's face in.

The next big thing for me to add will be the opening cutscene and the menus.