Develog

I almost forgot I had to write a devlog, so I did not get to take notes through development like I have in the past. Thinking back, absorption seemed like a challenging theme to make a game on at first, but I quickly settled on a platformer about a being that absorbs some kind of magic and uses it to take out enemies. I had recently been fiddling with Gdevelop and their default assets, like the pixelart ghost, and with Halloween coming up, it seemed a fitting choice for an enemy. I aimed to make the game something that would be fun for Halloween, while being neutral enough to be enjoyed anytime of year. For the player character, I did not want to spend too long picking or editing, so I just chose one of the default platformer blobs, since I knew it would do all the animations I needed. It also had a slime like quality that made the ability to absorb elements feel really logical – short of a fluffy towel, what could be better at absorbing than a viscous blob?

When deciding what I wanted to absorb, my first plan was water (blue), fire(red) and magic(purple), though I quickly decided to stick with fire and water. I first thought I would have the slime change color once it touched the fire or water, but that was not working very well and I felt it was changing the slime's appearance too much. Then I had the idea to use a glow effect when the slime touched the element. This caused the slime to have glowing red or blue outline, which kept it's appearance consistent and gave it a much more magical touch.

For several days, I just worked on creating the characters, their functions, sound effects and just building an experimental level and it was not until the final two days that I started making official levels. For the first level, I tried to make it a tutorial with “writing on the wall” that showed each step of the game such as touch fire to neutralize fire ghosts, water for water ghosts, otherwise don't touch either kind. 

One challenge I had while building was getting the tiles placed right. Sometimes, I could enter the same x or y coordinate, though that did not always work with some of the taller tiles and assembling the puzzle in Gdelvelop was making it hard to get tiles to overlap properly. I ended up using the image editor Gimp to create the hills since it allows me to set of a grid and “snap” to it.

Anyway, I have gained a lot of new skills making this game and hope everyone enjoys it.