What a rush (literally)!

It's been a rush. This is the first game I've made (well, except for some text based games in Basic 30 years ago...). It was also my introduction to Dragon Ruby, a project I've been following since before its public release a few years ago. The limitations of the Nokia Game Jam helped encourage me to finally dive in and take part. It's been a ride.

In general, using the Dragon Ruby toolkit as been superb and delightful. I'm a fluent Rubyist, so it was easy to get up and hacking. My original goal was to at worst, have a title screen, and an extremely basic gameplay loop (I can move, and maybe cause something to happen). After the first day, I had a pretty fun boat ride to cruise around on, including picking up fish pacman style. This came together way faster than I expected: I had already (practically) met my original goal, complete with what I think is pretty catchy, good video game music.

The game was originally planned to be a sort of Black Bass for NES clone. But it was fun to think about how instead of fighting the fish to land them... You'd ... Fight the fish, and eventually upset the lake enough for a giant sea monster to (try) taking  you down. Unfortunately, I didn't get that far. Trying to balance home (as a Dad) and work (as a FT employee) life while also learning how to leverage the Dragon Ruby toolkit, and learn how to set up animations, change scenes, etc kept a lot of great ideas at bay. I really am disappointed about the lack of Kraken in the Game Jam release of this game.

Today was crunch time. I had a decent enough gameplay loop going, but there was no way to "end" the game. While I had plenty of ideas, I hadn't yet figured out how to manage the battles programatically. I also didn't yet have the title screen and music, so I needed to whip together that, and the "lose" screen and music.

Today in the final hour, I added:

• Boss attacks player back, and can end game when HP is gone
• Title Screen with help text to understand the button
• Exit Screen

Some other things from this week since the last push to Itch:

• Separating foreground and background on the map, so you can travel "in front of" waves, and "behind" trees
• Honestly, let's be real: The Main Event: FIGHT THE FISH
  • This music is sweet. I really loved making music for the main game play (not so much the title screens, that was a total phone-in)
  • That HP bar-- hooo yeah. (Too bad I never got to getting the Kraken battles going!)
  • Killing boss fish doubles your "score" (threat!)
  • It also improves your Anchor dmg each time
  • It has a sweet final fantasy explode-apart dissolve that I'm proud of. I was able to hack that together in about 5 minutes while I was showing the game off to a friend (Thanks Luke!)