Dark Mart Post Game Jam UPDATE!

Dark Mart was my entry into the Pirate Software game jam of August 2024. My first time entering the Pirate Software game jams! If you're not familiar with Pirate Software, take a look at their YouTube channel or various social media profiles. They're all about uplifting developers and encouraging people from all kinds of backgrounds to create games. Now since I love making games, that was a message that I could get behind!

The theme for the game jam this time around was "Alchemy and Shadows". A double feature! Sometimes it's really difficult for me to come up with ideas for a game jam based on the theme. This theme however, was perfect for me! I immediately thought of the rules of alchemy.  Like the law of conservation which states energy can neither be created or destroyed, only exchanged. Or the law of providence, which states that objects made of a certain elemental make up can only be transformed into other objects with the same elemental make up. I decided to make a game that focused on combat, and using the spoils of victory to enhance the users powers. To incorporate shadows into the game, I wanted to create a fog of war effect that hides the objectives from the player forcing them to actively go out and explore the map in order to complete the objectives. With all of that in mind I went ahead and got to work developing! 

There was a lot of work to do, and my idea was definitely larger than what I was capable of creating within the time limit.  I feel that game jams are a great way to test yourself at your programming proficiency because the time limit tests your capabilities and forces you to try to take more efficient paths to the final result. I just did my best and put as much time and effort into the game that I was able to, and tried not to worry too much about the rest! If you want to see what the development of the game jam looked like, I posted daily updates on my YouTube, Threads and Instagram accounts.

There's also a sped up video of the game play of the game jam submitted game. It's sped up because the game play was quite slow, and I don't think that many people would be interested in watching it for more than a few seconds at normal speed.

Sped up gameplay: 

So. . . I submitted a game to the game jam. It wasn't particularly fun or complete. Now what?  Well, I decided to make a list of all the things that I wanted to include in the game but didn't get a chance to. Then I decided to go ahead and try to create a post game jam update to push myself further to improve my coding skills and try to make the game more fun! Which brings us to today, the new update for Dark Mart has just been released. I intend to continue making updates to the game and perhaps adding more to this dev log as I progress on the game while learning about game development.