Wildfire Swap Devlog

What is this?

For the PIGSquad 2020 Finish Your Game Jam, myself and my teammate Drew decided to make progress toward shipping our long term project Wildfire Swap. This page is a record of our time spent during the jam as a small devlog.

What were our goals?

• Spend an hour a day working on our project
• Publish a Steam Page
• Get a new playtest build ready

How'd we do?

We ended up getting pretty close to a daily bit of work during this period. We found it much more important to take breaks as needed and prioritize not burning out.

We got a first draft of our Steam page published! We've got improvements we'd like to make, but this jam is all about shipping! Wishlist our project!

We did not get an entire new playtest build ready, but we were able to adjust at least half the game in response to our last round of feedback.

Devlog

11/11

• Ryan: made ashrelight animation
• Ryan: ash relight animation now only plays if an ash pile is down wind of a wind mill
• Drew: Looked around world 3 to get my bearings. Fused two smaller levels to make a more interesting larger level.

11/12

• ryan: nothing :-)
• Drew: nothing :-)

11/13

• Ryan: added a background color change for different worlds
• Drew: Reordered world 3 first half.

11/14

• Ryan: added a little more robust theming transition system powered by the redux store. the background theme now transitions between background colors using a tween.

• Drew: Reworked a level to be more interesting.

• Drew: Finished a WIP level.

• Drew: Reordered world 3 second half.

11/15

• Ryan: playtested drew's updates for world 2 & 3.
• Ryan: made a series of very bad mockups for challenge world unlock symbol
• Drew: Watched Ryan playtest

11/16

• Drew: Reordered world 4 first half
• Ryan: nothin'

11/17

• Drew: Started looking at world 4 WIP levels
• Drew: Create a WIP inferno mode level
• Ryan: Re-orienting myself on Steam store page status. We have a lot of copy ready, not much of anything else. Went through and got a bunch of screenshots and various crops of logos and capsule images.

11/18

• Ryan: More steam uploading work. Seems like everything is taken care of except I need to figure out how the heck uploading a build works. Not sure how to manage windows/mac/linux stuff or test it or use a better pipeline than drag and dropping a zip file!

11/19

• Drew: Finished 2 WIP levels for world 4
• Ryan: finally got a mac build launching via steam! Submitted the store page to be approved. Apparently there's a 2-3 turn around that might be delayed due to covid as well...

11/20

• Ryan: Got steam page published! Confirmed mac build will download and launch via Steam!

11/21

• Ryan: Mostly a planning day! Re-onboarded Wes with Drew. Talked over strategy for remaining music. Some plans for trailer composition by Wes. Talked about UI change ideas as well, national park sign aesthetic vs. current weird pixel art "aesthetic". Confirmed Windows build launches via Steam. Added Drew and Wes to Steamworks.
• Drew: Art stuff. Idk how to break up art into nice bullet points.

11/22

• Ryan: ideating on national park sign ui idea. Sent email to future fonts about licensing question. Mocked up a basic, not fully functional idea for using signage as the main menu/settings menu
• Drew: made script to automate sprite exports