• Made blank Godot project called "LD51", which I connected to github using Github Desktop, including fancy little default gitignore for Godot that Desktop had in its dropdown
• Downloaded & installed the export templates for 3.5 (here's your friendly reminder to do the same, fellow Godot users who don't have it on Steam for auto-updates)
• Created template game description and cover image for both this jam and future ones

Going forward, I may or may not create an itch.io page in advance as well depending on the state of game embeds & whether I'll be using that in addition to or instead of itch.io. Most likely in addition to, in order to keep my itch.io as a proper hub for my games.

I also downloaded this starter template, which I won't be using directly in the jam (in spirit of doing everything from scratch for the Compo, which I always aim for but rarely finish in time for), but might very well look through to figure out HOW to do some of the stuff in it, like pause menus, etc.

Hopefully my calm (read: jittery and anxious) preparations (and lack of school-related stressors, now that I've graduated) will pay off in helping me successfully complete the Compo this time. Only reason I ever completed the Compo before was because I was brand new to Godot so I made the simplest mechanics I could think of, but since then I've graduated to more intermediate coding like I'm used to & thus need to really work on learning how to scope down.

Now the only worry is how I'll get through brain fog and executive dysfunction when the jam starts...

I'm already doing mental daydreaming over stuff I might want to do with my game this time, I don't usually have a lot of text or story in my jam games but I also am really curious to play around with setting up localization files (I also like dabbling in language learning, so translation into my target language(s) sounds like a fun mini-project on its own).

So if I set it up for localization but it only has English at launch, do you think updating the entry with other translations counts as a "new feature" (thus unacceptable addition post-jam) or "porting for accessibility" but for languages instead of consoles (where console/web/etc. ports are encouraged post jam)?

shoutout to whoever suggested "ascend to froghood" during slaughter because that's the only dream that's kept me voting for "Ascend"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LgwCVQdW1HM

you might be a tropical storm by the time you get to me but that's no excuse to scare me with two big loud BOOM sounds that made the house go black twice MINUTES before jam starts

luckily power and internet came back up very fast

the publicly hated theme winning? the community theme strawpoll ACTUALLY predicting the theme???

MADNESS!

dog lawyer says Woof, Your Honor

took 2 breaks so it's been about 10hours work but man the Brain Fog is a Demon scope down? what's coping down??? tetris is easy to make riiiiigggghhhhhhhttttt i already had partial code from an abandoned tetris project so it should be eaSSyyy riGGGHHHTTT but alas i never solved certain problems in that abandoned tetris project thus forcing me to solve them here and it is Exhausting

i have concerns about what i'll be able to get done over the jam and i'm getting sleepy enough that my brain ghosts are saying "this is bad, this isn't as creative/innovative as your other entries, The Theme Sucks and you should have spent more time brainstorming"

which is to say, oh well, at least the next one's in January, even if this one turns out Bad so I'll keep on trucking but might be another jam instead of compo entry for me, yet again lol getting too tired to think though, made a lot of tiny dumb mistakes in my shape factory logic, so I think it's time to rest and push a day 1 commit to github i guess since I set it up in github desktop and everything, which i forgot about til just now lol

good luck with your games everyone your prototypes all look fantastic!!

but it is what it is, i'll have to use pure stubbornness to compensate for low morale lol

but i think i need to restart been trying to use my old drag-and-drop tetris code since it was an unfinished project but solved the drag-and-drop code problems

but the unsolved problems of literally every other part of tetris are wearing me down, my collision code is....wonky. i think the best thing I can do is let go of what I'm doing and try a different method that might involve less headaches. otherwise this game's never gonna get off the ground if I can't even finish the core damn tetris part. it'll have to be relegated to extra or just never finished in that situation.

so, back to the coding drawing board, i've got a tutorial i'm gonna use to try to set things up better to begin with. god damn tetris is a Nightmare, how do mobile apps do it so well lol

which is to say that's 34 hours of the compo wasted on shitty physics that won't play nicely with my drag-to-move tetris blocks

haven't failed this hard at an idea since I tried to recreate donkey kong in community college for an assignment several years back lol

i guess i'll go back to the brainstorming phase, maybe i can come up with the world's tiniest mechanic idea for this theme, maybe i can still make a Dog Lawyer game but i'll have to think hard on it and it'll probably end up yet another shitty compo-timeframe jam entry lmaooo

keep up the good work though everyone else!! your games look great!! :blue_heart:

then woke up feverishly inspired on how to salvage my tetris game's code and fix it

and i was right but then found Even More Bugs then i lost power & internet for a bit around 5pm edt and had to shut my PC down for about an hour

which is to say I won't be getting anything respectable done for myself for jam, but i am helping a friend with their game, so if that game works out hopefully the site will let my friend add me to their team lol since i already joined event and all so not sure if adding teammates will work on me

if it won't let them add me to team I guess I'll upload whatever I have of my tetris nightmare sometime tomorrow or finish up the Dog Lawyer parts during extra but plan A is friend's game

after helping my friend off and on today through the power outage and stuff, i had them send me a list of the Rest Of The Features The Game Needs

i've helped scope down a lot but it most likely won't be done by jam so Extra It Is for us lads

for now i rest my weary coding hands :sleeping_accommodation:

but boy howdy, that vibe when the game runs properly on test but not on build

not used to Not Making It In Time For Jam, but looking forward to how our game turns out by the end of casual!

also it's dumb that godot's export scenes with dependencies doesn't seem to actually export the dependencies i got it working by saying EXPORT E V E R Y T H I N G which is dumb. gives me unity flashbacks

the games page isn't showing all extra games, and now that I and my friend's extra game isn't in the top ones that Are being shown, it isn't being shown on either of our profiles

i didn't do extras last time, is this normal? @pov

and still not everything in our trello is marked green!

I have to say that this, by far, has been the most coding I have ever done. What a wacky situation Hurrican Ian pushed me into - this is the largest project I've ever tackled, and the most new knowledge gained.

This isn't much of a post-mortem as it is a mid-mortem:

I've learned a LOT about scope. I tried to help scope our project down when I joined the team, but it still ended up being about an average of 2 or 3 hours for most features - longer when encountering bugs (of which there were many, and a frustrating amount were due to bugs in the Godot engine itself), shorter for easy things.

I learned a lot about the ebb and flow of burnout and its' affects on motivation, and how jumping into something that isn't coding or building scenes in Godot can be the starting point necessary for short-term recovery of motivation; sometimes polishing random assets is the right way to push yourself through the rest of the prototype!

I learned a lot of things about Godot, few of which I can remember off the top of my head. I learned that navigation is hard, especially using deprecated systems because learning the newer one would take too much time away from the real features.

I learned a LOT about teamwork and communicating my needs to my teammate - more-so than college or random team-ups have ever managed to teach me. It let me have the trust that the assets I received would be good, which made coding less stressful.

I learned that Trello automation has monthly quotas (gross), which we reached the limit of late last night (ugh)...

And I learned a hell of a lot about sleep deprivation, between trying to meet the original Jam deadline and trying to work on the project while people are replacing the bricks on my family's house, on the wall right next to my bed and computer desk... Noisy as hell, but I got a recording of the drill sounds and processes it for our game as an SFX, lol.

Long story short, this has been the most grueling and intense yet incredibly fulfilling LD I've participated in.

Would I want to do an Extra entry again? Probably not, at least not one of this scope. Trying hard for two weeks to finish a basic prototype so we could focus on playing&rating other people's games means that, other than the first couple of days where we took a break after the initial crunch weekend, we haven't really gotten around to many other games... and even now, I'm exhausted just looking at the few tabs I had open for the past two weeks.

Would I want to work with @shreemp on a jam entry again? Absolutely!

Now it's time to take the rest of October to recover - after that, maybe we'll continue our game, maybe we'll start something new together, who knows?

For now, I hope everyone else has had a great jamming season - and I look forward to doing it all again come January! Let's all start the New Year off strong together!

are extra games all supposed to be 0 average? i understand being N/Ath place because i know it's not supposed to be ranked against the other extra games since it's the casual format but it's wild to not see the average of the ratings on your own entry when it's still possible for extra games to be rated in the first place, like i've seen some entries with 100 ratings but it just says 0 average like why have it be functionally possible to opt in to ratings if it does nothing? :thinking: all those opinions going into the void lol

the brain banks are running a little dry for suggestions this time around, so subject to change but also meh may as well keep them like this:

Anyway, hi, I'm in, I love Godot, & I'll be working solo. Aiming for compo as always, probably landing somewhere amongst jam, as always. Excited for the triple LD experience in 2023 & whatever methods of theme voting we get to use this time around, I remember something about the slaughter round going away in the future but is the future now? Who knows!

what does this mean???? please explain your thought process, this is the second slaughter i've seen it in and i simply do not understand what a Fictional Physical Phenomena even means