Improve My Game Jam #15

Introduction

Hi there!

Rule 2 of the Improve My Game Jam #15 states "You must submit an outline of your improvements in a Devlog." and this is that devlog.

Improvements

• Each tool now highlights its approximate area of effect, when hovering over the fabric.
• There's a redo button now. ([Z] or [Y] = undo, [X] = redo, [R] = reset)
• I moved all GUI elements around in order to make space for itch.io's "Enter fullscreen" button in the bottom right of the web version.
• The hue and saturation of buttons and of the fabric are changed in the shader instead of using multiple sprites.
• I replaced GLFW with sokol_app in order to reduce the number of dependencies (especially once I add sokol_audio for sound).
• The tools in the 3rd column from the left have been replaced, which made it necessary to design a bunch of new levels.

Efficiency?

Adding color space transformations to the shader, replacing GLFW, and moving all GUI elements around were all not strictly necessary, but touching all those different elements of the game was a nice way to re-familiarize myself with the code.

I wasted a lot of time trying to use a fancy meta build system to manage the different settings and tool chains for the desktop and web versions. For some reason it only supports Emscripten on Linux/Mac, but not on Windows. Learning enough about all the systems involved in order to fix this would have taken even longer, so I decided to go back to calling emcc with hand-written command line arguments.

Designing new levels that are solvable with the changed game mechanics also took a while, but given that the new tools are more orthogonal and introduce interesting new interactions, I think this was the right decision.

The Future

• It's a shame that I didn't have the time to add audio. Especially since it's one of the rating criteria of the jam. I just didn't want to rush this, because low quality audio is much worse than silence.
• Adding animations to all the different tools will take some time, but it'll make it easier for new players to learn the mechanics.
• I have an idea for a "plot twist". I am not planning to go full Frog Fractions on this, but I do want to add a second half to the game.
• I want to try rendering everything with a single draw call instead of issuing one draw call per quad. How does it impact the performance and usability for a game of this size?
• Keyboard-only controls (or at least keyboard-based tool selection) might be nice.

Did you really read all of this? Come on! Stoff_OS is just a tiny unfinished game by a non-famous developer. Maybe consider working on your own game instead of reading irrelevant devlogs. ;) Good luck!