Devlog: Day 3

Day three was much of the same; putting in about 6 hours into development. Today I worked on primarily a state machine for handling game states, which you can see a sample of here:

The various menu screens are just placeholders for now (hopefully); I plan to spend a good portion of one day in the jam juicing up all of the menus, but that will definitely be something that is dropped out of the plan if I get crushed for time.

Overview of work for the day

Planned tasks

• Implement a state machine to handle menus and initiating a game (done)

Unplanned tasks

• Refined several gameplay UI components
  • Added a lives counter
  • Created a better UI widget for displaying which spell is selected
• Added menu screens
  • Title screen (showing high score)
  • How to play screen
  • Credits screen
  • Game-over/report card screen
• Refinement in the code to clean up some stuff
  • Created a dedicated code tab for drawing menus
  • Refined play state management a bit
  • General clean-up of code an reduction in redundant code
    

The "game over" screen will have stats for the player. In general, here are all of the menu screens (most in mock-up phase)

Title screen

How to play screen

Credits screen

Game over screen

Pico-8 resource consumption

I love working within the constraints of Pico-8. Some people see working with constraints adds unneeded difficulty to a project, but for me I find that it keeps me much more focused. That being said, I'm hoping to not run into the token limit in Pico-8 on this project. As much as I like doing optimization stuff, I really want to get to the point that I have plenty of room to just spend the last few days of the jam doing en mas content creation. As it stands now, I'm utilizing around 45% of the memory tokens. I'm not nervous... yet.

Plan for tomorrow

Tomorrow I want to continue working on game mechanics outside of play to further get the state system working relibably and comprehensively. I want to really clean those systems up and make them solid so that I can spend the 2nd half of the jam focusing on game content and playable.

Tomorrow's list

• work on player lives handler
• iterate on the player stats system
  • level win
  • level loss
• palette shifter for color changes between levels

Misc. note

I've been a hobbist music lover and musician most of my life, and my tastes in music are fairly diverse ranging from classical to folk to metal. But for development, I really need to have instrumental music and needs to be fairly chill. When I put such music on, I lose track of hours as I get 'into the zone'. For me there is a stand-out musician that works for me, General Fuzz:

• https://open.spotify.com/artist/6GmYm47Zgk3tvoCeJbsH5r?si=ptdl3T_yQ62kMPKR740q6Q
• https://soundcloud.com/generalfuzz
• https://generalfuzz.net/