Yes, I am crazy. That's why I've decided to commit myself to making a game for NewGrounds' Stencyl Game Jam 2014, which ends on March 28th, one week from today. Here's why I'm crazy:
The game jam was announced a whole month ago, but I only found out about it one week ago, at which time I had never used Stencyl before. Plus, I am very new to game dev. I only started trying to learn game development just over a year ago. I've only completed one game (which sucked btw) up to this date. I've never done a game jam before, and I started my first one now when it was more than halfway through, and the way I started it was to cram like crazy to learn Stencyl as fast as I can. That means about 12 hours a day on average on game dev. But it is so much fun! So, yeah, I'm crazy...
So I'm going to make the next few posts to show my progress on the game I'm working on, a 2D platformer game, if anyone is interested in this kind of game dev. Don't expect much the first few posts. I've spent the last 2 days programming the run and jump movement of the player, as well as programming moving platforms that will allow the player to ride and jump off of them correctly. I decided that Stencyl's built-in behavior for run and jump movement is terrible (no offense, Stencyl), so I started making my own from scratch. It's been a buggy process, but progress is being made. Here's a snapshot of what I have so far.
Don't expect the final game to look anything like this. What I have here is a simple test scene I used to work out the mechanics of the player's character movement. There is much more artwork to come, as well as more mechanics. I'll probably give the character a gun to shoot enemies. I also plan to make the main character look completely different. This one now is a bit too wide and so it makes the gameplay a bit awkward when trying to fit through narrow openings. Creating the character animations for idle, run, jump, shoot, hurt, and die in Pixelmator are my next immediate goals.
I plan to also do the music myself for this game jam. I worked on one song, "Stencyl Jam 1 (WIP)," last night and I uploaded it here: http://www.newgrounds.com/audio/listen/570711
Thanks for reading!