Well this one might be a little bittersweet.. 😅

I recently decided to try and participate in the sixth Nokia 3310 Jam where you make games with the limitations of the Nokia 3310. The limitations were...

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- 2 colors with a fixed palette, 

- A view of only 84 by 48 pixels, 

- One voice Nokia style beeping for all sound and music with no overlapping audio

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It might be a little bit harsher of limitations then what I'm used to working in, but this time around I was feeling up to the challenge. I even got four days off at work due to some scheduling issues, so it seemed like a way to make the best of an unfortunate situation.

Besides!

✨What could POSSIBLY go wrong? ✨

Planning and Plotting

It's not my first rodeo with this particular game jam. I had originally attempted to participate in the previous jam with another member of our crew, getting as far as making music and sound effects. However, after getting bogged down by display issues and my partner struggling with one-bit artwork we eventually decided it would be best to sit this one out and try other jams. She wasn't interested in participating this time around so I decided to take it on myself!

I started by trying to come up with ideas relating to the theme "Freeze!". I typically use Milanote for all my brainstorming, but I quickly settled on a simple game where you sail the arctic dodging icebergs and catching fish.

A Strong Start

After jumping into Gamemaker Studio 2, I quickly got basic movement working. I was going for a top down perspective so moving in all directions just felt right. I have to admit being able to move around with the number pad keys is.. pretty cursed, I felt that this game jam warranted it (of course you can still use WASD and the arrow keys. I'm not a monster). After that I began getting systems in place for obstacle spawning. It was essentially going to work like this:

Icebergs would start offscreen on either the left or right side at a random height before choosing a picking it's speed and shooting off across the screen. Then, of course, it would get deleted after going off screen again. To add a little bit of variety, I also made a few iceberg designs and picked them at random, along with randomly mirroring the sprite (can you tell I like randomization?).

Fish would work in almost exactly the same, except the sprite always faces the direction it's moving.

Simple, simple, simple..

Everything was going according to plan so nicely! I even took some time to make the art for the title screen and started setting up the game page in advance! So really...

✨WHAT COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG??✨

Things Go Wrong

I spent some time getting the title screen working, simple transitions from one scene to another, a custom sound function that prevents overlapping audio, and then BOOM..

I got an idea, as I often do, and decided to implement mouse control. I figured if I did then the game could actually be played through a mobile browser and it seemed like it was working with the Windows and Opera GX targets. But what about HTML, does that one work too? 

No, not at all. *sigh*

I spent longer than I'd care to admit trying all kinds of things to solve the problem and in the end I just could not find a solution. The closest I got to an answer was an old post on Gamemaker Forums talking about the issue and that it was a bug found when resizing the window. Fantastic.

Remember how I said last time I participated I got bogged down by display issues? Yeah, there was more of that too. I had decided to try and implement an auto window scaling function that attempts to find the closest scale by starting at multiplier of 40 and counting down by one until it was just smaller than the size of your display. Which, despite being a weird fix to replace a window size setting, worked fine enough... but only outside of a browser. When played in a browser it would end up shrinking to the size of the HTML embed on the page and couldn't be scaled up.

At this point I had spent around a whole day just trying to fix bugs in my messy systems, and just decided "screw it" and scrapped them. Mouse support and my broken auto-scaler were taken out completely. I just went with a reasonable scale for the window in HTML and let you resize it freely as an executable. The lesson I've learned is to just make a regular settings menu instead of tryin' to be all ✨fancy schmancy✨ 😑. It's just a shame I had to take out mouse support along with it, but even after the scaler was gone the bug still remained. With no more time to fix it the only option seemed to be removal.

Recycling and the Rest of the Owl

After all of that was taken care of, I decided to jump right back into working on the actual game. So, I came up with another gameplay idea; a whirlpool that would spawn and kill you in a single touch, as well as shift the trajectory of icebergs so they'd be a little more dangerous. Oh, and of course I decided little icebergs weren't scary enough and made some larger ones as well.

Once those were in it was time for.. well let's just say it was time for the "rest of the owl." HUD to show your stats during gameplay, bounding boxes to prevent you from travelling off screen, a death animation, and sound effects. The sound effects and music were actually pulled from the project made for Nokia Jam #5, although I decided against using the looping game track because it would have driven anyone playing the game for long periods of time insane (Yes, it's that bad). 

But with everything done, that means it's time to submit the game to the jam and move on-

You Missed that One. Try Another!

So it turns out that I actually missed the deadline? I could've sworn when I had viewed it several times that the deadline said 4:30am in my time, but regardless of what I thought, the reality is I was wrong.

Oh well. I'll still post this game anyhow and move on to my next project. I've learned a couple of things from this one, about time management and handling web based exports. But truly? I'm just happy to have finished a game for the first time in a while.

If you read all of this, thank you. I appreciate your time. :)

Feel free to check out our other projects, and also my little failed jam entry. 

In the words of the eternal Bop-It: I'm going to sleep!

- Adrian R. 🧡