Devlog:

Saturday:

Before the start of the jam, I was wondering if there would ever be an SKG public event to help with outreach. After seeing the jam, I thought about making a game about such a public event, after the theme was revealed as "Limited Lifetime", I wondered if that could work with my public event idea. I often like to think of unique ways to interpret a theme to try to stand out, hence "Limited Lifetime" -> "Limited-life Thyme" to invent a product that my game world could revolve around.

I made a quick stool sprite, reused a protagonist and pizza sprite from previous jams, and started by making it so you could collect pizzas from stools.

Sunday:

At this point, it was clear that I would be making some kind of food transportation game set at some kind of SKG event. I had an old "Meat" sprite I had quickly done in a previous jam, and I searched online to see if there was any thyme pixel art. I couldn't find any, so I just searched for some thyme pictures and made some pixel art myself. I made a chef based on the protagonist I had, and some table sprites. The tables are now what gives you food while the stool receives food.

My current idea was to have some kind of tutorial where there are no attendees, then you're loaded into a completely new area where you would have to enter event tents and visit all kinds of stools. Attendees who were successfully served would have something to say if talked to. Perhaps the event could have its own gamejam booth? Perhaps the game could have a 3D graphics mode?

Monday:

I was hoping to get a simple tutorial done today, but I got caught up making the AI of the chef look more like it was cooking and placing food. This ended up taking a while. It was clear I wouldn't be able to get everything I wanted done in time.

Tuesday:

The deadline was extended! That was nice, though I didn't have as much time throughout the week to work on the game as I had originally hoped. Nonetheless, I got separate stools marked by a sprite of what they can take that gets more opaque as they fill up.

Wednesday:

I got a basic tutorial win-state working.

Thursday:

With the original deadline coming up, I had hoped to have some kind of submit-able build today. It was clear that we needed the extension. I got some story and opening animations done today.

Friday:

I got my first playable build done! After the opening is a new tutorial that "builds itself" through Godot animations. I customised the export HTML to play a video before the game starts. This video would be updated with later builds. I wanted to add the video because of the splash screen assets posted by the jam organisers.

Saturday:

Didn't have much time to work on it today, but I added some text that floats up and fades out to the stools to make it clearer what was happening, as my use of modulate to change the colour of the stools and the opacity of the food sign wasn't clear enough by itself.

I also wanted to try adding a tile-map, so it would be easier to make a proper event grounds, but after struggling with setting z_index for individual tiles with the Godot 3 tile map, it was clear that that wasn't going to happen, so I had to give up on that. It seems tile maps are a lot more useful in Godot 4.

Sunday:

I was able to crunch out some attendee AI to shop at the stools. They pick a stool to use and pathfind to it, though that path is just a straight line as it seems I couldn't get the pathfinding nodes to work correctly. I eventually had to just let them walk through stools. Also, I wanted them to queue up, but their queuing logic only slightly works.

Final day:

Rather than make a separate event area room, I decided to just expand the tutorial area. I already had some space above the tutorial area that I could use. This meant some balancing issues, as you could just save up food in the tutorial. I didn't have time to make food on head expire. I had to quickly write some attendee dialogue and try to fix up their AI a bit. Unfortunately it seems it is somehow possible for their queuing logic to infa-loop and freeze the game. Not sure exactly why that happens yet, but it seems to still be possible to get through the game without it crashing. I added a "debug" button that takes you to the debug rooms that I put at the end of the Sunday build, and also a reset button that resets the game. The button should have been changed to "To debug rooms" or somthing, but I didn't get round to it.

The deadline turned out to be 4 hours later than I thought, so I had time to polish the game up a bit, but it still has plenty of flaws. It would have been nice to have a skip button for the tutorial. Also, it seems some people's browsers don't play the mp4; preventing the game from loading. Also, I didn't realise until the rating period that there would be a sound raring.

Seems it's still capable of crashing. Nooo...! Oh well. Still somewhat works.