Hey there, how’s it going?
The GMTK 2021 game jam just wrapped up and it was quite a ride
If you aren’t familiar, the Youtube channel Game Maker’s toolkit,
which you should really be watching if you aren’t already
Runs an annual 48 hour design competition that continues to grow and break records
Last year more than 18 thousand people joined and over five thousand games were entered
I was lucky enough to have been selected one of the top 20 winners with the game I made
called make the way
1 year later and it’s time once again to join thousands of other devs to make a game
in 48 hours from a theme
This time I feel so much more pressure though
Last year I was just taking part for the first time and hoping people liked what I made
I had a fairly small youtube channel and figured it would be fun content and that was it
Of course it went better than I could have ever dreamed but now I feel this expectation
for myself
I’ve been struggling quite a bit with stress and anxiety lately and I was really thinking
of not taking part in the jam at all
I had built it up in my head so much that I didn’t think I was going to have any fun
taking part
And seriously, game jams are stressful
They really are, you have to do a lot in a very short period of time
If you aren’t having fun during the process what is the point of putting yourself through
it
So I reached out to my friend WhiteVault to see if he wanted to team up
This shares the load and will help me separate from what I did last year
We did the Wowie 3.0 jam a while back and had a great time working together
We both have a similar style and philosophy when it comes to making games
And his art is amazing, seriously I want to be as good and quick at art as he is when
I grow up
Real quick because I’m sure there will be comments
Drewpy had too much going on in real life and I asked about teaming up far to late
For those wondering why we didn’t get the whole dream team back together
The jam started Friday at 11 am for me
Vault and I were on a call and watched the theme announcement live like so many other
This year we have 48 hours to make a game with the theme of Joined
Together
Interpreting a jam theme is always interesting and it’s amazing how the process is different
every time
I always try to not use my initial ideas because I assume many others will be doing the same
My mind was flooding with thoughts of platformers where 2 characters are tied together is some
way
Or 2 elements linked with a chain or rope
WhiteVault had a image that he really wanted to use as inspiration
This concept of a door or portal that cultist had to give offerings to
Basically your life or well being is joined to this eldritch entity
I was still thinking of ice climbers so I jumped at the idea and we spent the next 30
to 45 refining the concept
Just picking up and placing items seemed a little to straight forward
I recently played Overcooked for the first time with my daughter
I know, somehow I just hadn’t played it yet
So with that fresh in my mind we tweaked the concept to be
an eldritch horror demon creature thing has taken you captive
You must make them the food they want to keep their hunger bar full
Because your life and their hunger are joined together
If they get so hungry the bar empties, they will eat you and you will lose
To add a little more action and stuff to do while food is cooking we decided to add in
a twin stick shooter type mechanic
The ingredients are little demon creatures that are jumping all around the room
You enter the room and the doors close like in a rogue like
You must deal with all the creatures before they will open again
This will use precious time each time you try to get an ingredient
With that plan in place we both hopped off the call to start our respective twitch streams
to work
We got underway as you would expect
Setting up a player box that can move in 8 directions and shoot in the direction of the
mouse
I created some place holder creatures that you will need to stun and pick up
Because they aren’t going to be aggressive I just set it up that they will move around
randomly
And just be generally annoying to hit
I used the same concept as the people in a game I made a while back called Flyer Kid
We planned to move between rooms to get ingredients
We need to keep everything in scope so 2 rooms seemed reasonable
One would be the pantry and have half of the creatures we would need
While the other half would be living in the cellar
This would mean that you need to go between the 2 rooms depending on what was aksed for
While I was doing this WhiteVault was cranking out the art for the demon and our player character.
As well as some temp layout mock ups
I threw them in to save everyone just looking at colored boxes but didn’t link up any
animations or anything yet
The rest of the stream was spent getting the ability to enter the pantry, have it spawn
a number of creatures, lock the door and only unlock after all the creatures in the room
have been stunned
After the stream I took break for a couple hours to have dinner and hang out with the
family but then it was back to work
48 hours is not a lot of time and will sneak up on you really quick
We had a bit of an ambitious concept so I wanted to make sure that I could make it work
and not let me teammate down
To add a little variety I made it so when you enter the pantry it re-arranges the shelves
in the room
I was worried that the game would be confusing to play at first and we were going to need
a tutorial
This is when I got the brilliant idea of why not create everything with the tutorial flow
That way I can make and teach one mechanic, then unlock another one, then another until
it’s all there
And when someone doesn’t need the tutorial we just skip to the end and unlock it all
for them
Yeah, spoilers, this was bad idea but let’s not get ahead of ourselves
I set up a dialog system that would give instructions
Then tell you to go in the pantry and find a certain type of enemy
Then give you an arrow of which one to pick up (Friday(5))
Then tell you to put it in a cooker and that’s all awesome
I chose to divert from the overcooked inspiration and not have any prep stuff that the player
had to wait for
I was worried it would slow down the game so you just put stuff in the cookers and it
does it’s thing
This makes the experience about running between the rooms and not sitting in one place for
too long
But I was running into a lot of bugs and having general issues with it all working consistently
It was late, so it’s time for some rest and we’ll get back to it in the next day
Saturday
Saturday I did another stream but I was really not happy with the progress
I had hoped to have all the systems in place by now
That included cooking, feeding and orders
What I had was a first stage of a tutorial that was overly complicated in the code and
causing conflict . Yay
So on the stream I decided to not bash my head against the code for a bit and implement
all the art WhiteVault had been sending me
Dealing with my spaghetti code nightmare can be a future me problem
We were going to have 6 food types and they are the usuals you would think of for an eldritch
abomination
Pigs, Donuts, Fish?.. I don’t think fish are supposed to have feet (cut off), cheese
kitties, slimes, and wine
What were you expecting? Pumpkin juice?
There will be 3 ways to prepare each, you can boil it in the cauldron, freeze it in
the fridge, or zap it in the microwave
I know I prefer my wine microwaved to enhance the aroma
5 michelin stars here I come
After a few hours we had a lot of the general art in and the animations hooked up
They are so cute, whitevault killed on everything
After the stream I took another little break and then got back to work
We planned for a cellar and pantry to split up where you needed to go for certain items
There are 3 specific creatures per room
I didn’t want the player to enter a room and not be able to get the one they needed
So when spawning, the system always spawns one of each and then picks randomly for any
extra
This way if you need a donut like we all do sometimes, one will always show up in the
panty when you enter
It’s now that sad time in every project where I become future me and have to start
dealing with all the garbage past me has been putting off
I have to say this time, that guy sucks
The whole way the tutorial and process was set up is utter trash
There are so many things that depend on other things happening that if one element is out
of place it all goes to hell
Even when everything is working it’s still too overly complicated to move forward with
I had thought myself so smart, thinking why don’t more people do this
Well now I know
I ended up making all the mechanics tied in too much with the tutorial elements so they
didn’t work properly if you weren’t following the steps
Thus began the exciting process of rewriting a ton of mechanics
Not a great state to be in
I got most of the element working independently like they should\
You can stun enemies, pick up the one you want, put it into the cooker of your choice,
when it’s done you can pick it up and give it to velma
Great finally, only one problem.
It’s like 2 in the morning, the jam ends at 11 am and I still need to have an ordering
system, win and lose states, the linked up heath and hunger which the whole thing is
based on, audio, effects, menus, and more
I gave up the idea of sleep at this point and settled into the grind
I suggest not pulling all nighters in game jams but I didn’t have much choice if I
wanted to the game to be playable
Do as I say and not as I do
For the ordering I decided to go with 3 options at any given time that you can feed to velma
that will increase your life bar
If you give something she doesn’t want, your bar will go down faster.
This whole build just seemed to take me forever
I ran into so many little bugs and issues that I would have to spend 10 min here debugging
20 minutes there and the time just disappeared
Sometime after 4 am I gave up completely on the idea of an in game tutorial and tried
to add elements that would help the player passively
For instance the cooked items don’t really look like their living counterparts
So for each room I made a posters for the walls that show what each creature produces
But the game is still silent and not super juicy
So for the next couple hours I added sound effects, particles, screenshake and the like
to help the overall appeal and polish
And as always this took forever too
I’m not great with audio so I rely on sound packs I have purchased over time
But that means that I have to sift through them to find what works and this always takes
a good amount of time
It’s about 8:30 in the morning at this point and I was about to pass 24 hours of being
awake
With the gameplay togther, it’s time for the menus and the win and lose screens
They are a bit lack luster but I was just trying to make sure that all needed elements
are there
I finally uploaded the game and we did some very brief testing around 9:30 in the morning
No matter what, there is always issues with the build and you need to go back and reexport
This was no exception but I found out later i still missed a few things
With around 20 minute left in the jam I was setting up the itch page when the whole site
started to have issues
Loading slowly, image links breaking and the like
This is not uncommon with the end of the GMTK jam
Thousands of people trying to upload at the same time will cause issues for a site that
usually doesn’t get hit that hard all at once
There were over 21 thousand people entered in the jam.
Not everyone will be uploading a game nut still, that’s a lot
So to be safe I submitted the game about 17 minutes before the deadline
I then spent the next hours or so trying to get the graphics to show on the game page
They didn’t
So I gave up and finally went to lay down around 12:30
I planned to get up in about 4 hours to start working on this devlog
Yeah, I didn’t wake up until about 7:30 pm sleeping through 2 alarms
Guess I needed the rest
And that is the end of my GMTK 2021 Game jam build and this is game that myself and WhitVault
have created
Eldritch eateries is a top down twin stick shooter ish style game that is heavily inspired
by the games Overcooked and The Binding of Isaac
You are a chef that has been captured by a ravenous demon who has linked your life with
their feeling of fullness
Thay will give you 3 desired items that you can feed them
You will need to run between the pantry and cellar to collect the creature that needs
to be cooked
Because the creature run around you must stun them all before you are able to leave the
room with the one you desire
Then you will prepare it as needed before feeding it to your captor
There is a normal mode where you must prepare 5 meals to win and a hard where you must make
10 and the timer is a bit quicker
I added an endless mode so you could just keep going until you eventually ran out of
time, it tracks the number of meals you made and saves it as a high score
The only problem is I screwed up some trigger so nothing happens when the counter reaches
0
So there is no way to set your score because you never really finish
Which honestly is a bit frustrating but what can you do
I’ll fix that when the judging is over and I can upload an update
I’m writing this about 10 hours after the submission and there have already been quite
a few comments
Most people really seem to like it but one thing I keep seeing is that it’s confusing
at first but fun once you figure it out
Which I was worried about and why I put so much effort into the sadly scrapped tutorial
system
I really wanted that but sometimes in a jam you just have to get something submitted
I have had a couple comments of people not being able to put down and item and I’m
not sure if that is because they are not in the right place like in front of a machine
Or if there is a genuine bug that is causing it to get stuck
Either way that is an issue for me to check because there is either a coding problem which
is very possible or I have not made it clear enough what you are supposed to do
No matter how this game does this year I had a lot of fun making it
I think it’s a neat idea that keeps the player in constant action
If you are interested I hope you give it a try and enjoy
If you participated in the jam I would appreciate it if you also gave it a rating
There are over 5800 games submitted to this jam which is incredible
Check out the links in the description to our game as well as all the other games also
I’ll be playing games on my live stream all week and I look forward to see what everyone
made
Thank you to Mark Brown of game maker's toolkit for once again putting on a fantastic event
Thank you to my friend and teammate mate whitevault for crushing the visuals and making this game
so appealing to look at
Please check him out live on twitch and he just started making videos on youtube as well
The links are in the description, please send him some love
Even though I ended up sacrificing a bit of sleep I had a amazing time and I’m really
pleased with the outcome
If you want to see and talk to me while I work on projects like this live, check out
my streams at twitch.tv/vimlark
Thank you all very much for watching
I would like to give an extra special shoutout to my amazing patreon supporters
Especially
Clonethirteen Daniel Martin
Dany Pitre David Scott
Endmark Games EngineerKappa
Enkuryo iNightGaming
Jedd Goble Kevin Horkaew (Hall-Gao)
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Tra Friesen Warren (Stephen) Rose
Webox YellowQueen
You are all amazing and I can not thank you enough for all the support
Once again you can get in contact with me on my live stream, message me on twitter or
join the discord with a lot of other awesome people
If you enjoyed this please like and subscribe and I will talk with you next time
Have a good one
Later