Well the theme is certainly specific, although I guess no matter what someone's going to be cramming a game into it in some awful way.

Originally someone suggested a cooking theme for CC25, and I spent time processing some possible ideas, and I have one that actually works well with the heat theme. I plane on making Food Fighter, which will hopefully be a simple game about a guy who works in a friend's café and has to kill sentient food puns creatures to get ingredients to make different foods. I'd like an RPG-esque element with upgradeable armor and weapons, with the weapon being a flamethrower that starts as an industrial-grade blowtorch for making crème brûlée. It's gonna be extremely bizarre. Fun with tilemaps, sprite ordering, and lots of pointers and entities to keep track of. Fun!

Also I wrote "FLAMETHROWER" on my initial ideas page for this so I knew I had to do it.

Seems exquisite!! I can't wait to see it.

I'm excited to see what you come up with, Dub.


That sounds like an amazing mechanic, sign me up.

Okay, I've been chiseling away at a tilemapped engine for the game, with a simple room as the "Main Menu" zone where the player can learn what buttons do what and get some instructions on what to do, along with maybe buying the weapon upgrades and checking stats later. So far I have a simple priority list:

- Make game

# Finish simple sprites, upgrade as time allows
# Make main menu room with basic functionalities
# Make battle-kitchen
* Make enemy and ingredient objects and control functions
* Make ingredient call and input system

- Make game cool

# Make day-counter for each workday, six in total with respect to Sunday
# Make payday system and upgrades shop
# Work on health system mechanics
# Make moar/better puns I'm going straight to hell for what I have planned already
# Supa-dupa-extra-deluxe final boss?

- Logic 'n Lore

# More characters and animated cut-scene type bits
# Slow explanation of world and why anyone would logically think that fighting sentient food is a good idea
# Dumb jokes (calculator ones?)

And that's the roadmap I'm probably not going to write somewhere but just try to remember. So as for more heat-power mechanics and such, the flamethrower is used to burn the shells off of the ingredients synthesized by the Cellular Reconstruction Device. CRD-generated material may have a film of cell-gel that has to be removed, and it's thick enough that burning it shouldn't ruin the ingredients (although I've been thinking about a ways they could get burned if they're left on the floor). Ingredient "pods" should be a day-one thing and only a sign that the CRD isn't programmed correctly *insert lore I don't want to spoil* and will be replaced by food baddies afterwards as the CRD tries to create "the superior organic substance." The flamethrower compresses oxygen gas from the environment and uses it as a flammable gas. It needs time to recharge though, so you can't hold the fire button and sit in a corner, spamming helps but you can't change direction when firing and also slow down a great deal when walking. The avatar, who 2 AM me named Jerry in a late-night-coding-frenzy, has literal RPG physics, doesn't need to breathe, and has a health bar due to the global *insert lore here*. I hope to make this game overly self-aware in a way where everything makes sense and has some simple rules. I also plan on maybe having a secondary button that not only takes double the oxygen but also overheats the backpack by either generating a ranged fireball attack or allowing a moon-jump/hover effect that can be purchased in the shop. The overheating can lead to an explosion and an instant kill that destroys Jerry and "respawns" him (or an alternate reality version of him, I'm trying to find something both intriguing and ethically horrifying here) back at his bed.

Wow look at that text wall.


Thanks! I'm excited to lose to your space game; you're definitely going to beat the pants off me with all those extra dimensions and lighting effects!

Wibi wabu, I have eye-candy for you:



So nothing's interactive, this is the "main menu" where I hope to add the shop, mission system to guide the players, and statistics. The door doesn't work yet, and yes, there is no chair at the desk. That'll be later when I have time 'cause BOY sprites are hard. I have rediscovered my artsy talent, and I'm actually quite proud of my digital art since I used a mouse and it looks okay.

Looking great so far King!

As you can see, I now have a health counter, rudimentary doors, and the first room/arena. The warping around is caused by the fact that the home spawn sends you next to your bed, and I can actually change that but I don't see a good reason too yet since this technically half the behavior I want after death. The health bar goes up to 3, no max health set yet, and I've set it to two to show off the full and cracked/empty heart symbols. No, I did not intend for the colors of the storeroom arena to look so minty; and yes, I do hear the "how it feels to chew 5 gum" commercial when I see it. The rectangles are platforms for where ingredients/enemies fall to, and the slot on the wall is the ingredient input. I need to make the flamethrower graphics and the Jerry_weaponized sprites. I guess I'll need to learn to use GIMP for the fire, and oddly enough I still have almost half of the color palette left at my disposal, so that's nice. The little number up in the top right is yet another FPS counter, as you can see we're doing good with a lock at 25 FPS and a chance of kicking it up a bit later if I can really streamline the collision checks.

New problem (and probably the next post): making enemy sprites and creating a sprite layering system for the distance illusion since the map has a tilted perspective.

Great work, King Dub Dub! I like the art style that you've chosen for this, and it looks like you have a good amount of the game mechanics (room switching, movement, spawning, etc.) worked out (?).

Keep up the effort, we have less than two weeks left now.

To answer all that:
Thanks, commissions are open never.
I had an "engine" I suppose, most mechanics are fleshed out now.
Room switching works but I'd like to polish it.
Movement is surprisingly robust and I can't wait to add funky tile collision for small things like tables.
Spawning enemies was not functional then, it is now.



BEHOLD, ANGY SAMMICH MEN.

The stuff, in a quick list that was supposed to be shorter, but featurecreep was faster than my ability to make an update post, so here's a (massively) delayed (but huge) update:
-FPS lock is dropped to 20, since an unoptimized version hit 26 FPS and scared the crap out of me
-Room switching animation
-Slamwhiches are a thing
-Enemy hitbox calculation for damage (dealt and given)
-Jerry has an Edge Oxygen Compression and Combustion Tool (OCCT)
-I made fire and I love how it turned out
-Strafing is a thing
-Jerry has angry eyebrows
-Health is now done correctly, lost hearts are no longer transparent
-Ingredients are now a thing (so far only bread drops)
-Inventory slot functions
-Timer made for beginning rounds
-timer for each round
-OCCT temperature gauge added, but currently not useful
-Lots of under-the-hood optimizations, mainly making a nested-if hell that's annoying to debug but surprisingly speedy (and that's all that matters)
-Code readability improved, weird use cases increased

Quick To-Do:
-Make proper death animations (greyscale Jerry?)
-Enemy AI
-Add enemies (possibly 2, maybe 4 more)
-Add input slot functionality
-Add item input calls (board with needed ingredients for recipe?)
-Add hub room functionality (AKA just the laptop giving the mission and instructions)
-Appvar data saving
-Add signature funny ha-ha comments about switch cases

The slamwhiches scream in agony as they burn for a single frame, and the abruptness of their life and immediate transformation into bread is extremely hilarious to my puerile mind.

Praise God for the extension, I should have this done soon. But most of you know my track record with deadlines...

I have officially submitted, but what I'm going to keep what I've done a secret so It'll be more exciting to play it on the official release dates for all the contest entries. It'll be like Cyberpunk 2077; string everybody along with short videos and logs of a really cool game, and then build a massive hype train of users! Well hopefully not like Cyberpunk, I've spent so much time fixing bugs and then trying to predict bug's existences with redundancies, and then deleting the redundancies since they either caused bugs or turned out to be useless in the long run. The only hint, if you wish to know: You cannot play as former US President Barack Obama.

Whelp, I've got a pending archives submission, a GitHub repo, and a burning urge to remake this project at a later date. However, until then I have become aware of the fact that I have an entire tilemapping engine and collision system, of which a large chunk is actually unused (and I spent a majority of my time working on making it simple too). So here's the end of this mess, may a remastered version or a "main course" come out someday as a result of a side project.

EDIT: I figured I might as well mention two bugs that may or may not even be noticed: the "Paused" text is off-centered and I'm not entirely sure if that was on purpose but I don't like it now, so it's a bug; there is a very small chance that everything will turn into cheese upon loading an active game. I was trying to patch up some stuff last-minute and noticed that the sprite pointers and animation data would occasionally save incorrectly, so I made a failsafe for everything to reset to the entities' default values, but any with highly corrupted data would turn into cheese. I can't recreate this but I know my failsafe is working correctly to repair bad data. Tell me if it happens, I may have patched it out by accident.

The engine looks cool, and the core gameplay is solid!

I like that one of the game's few known bugs is that everything is cheese. If I were you, I would have intentionally implemented that as the result of a 1/1,000,000 chance on start-up.

P.S.
My highscore is 78, and my self-preservation sucks.

CONGRATION SLIME, you found the unreproduceable bug that triggers the cheese failsafe! I found that sometimes my pointers were going bad for some reason, so I made a failsafe that would read the data to try to figure out what they were and set their default animations/sprites. Sometimes stuff would go really wrong, so I just made the "anti-cheese" feature that makes all entities turn into dairy products. It's kinda intentional, but I didn't think anyone would ever find it since I'd seemingly fixed the bug, so I left it in for kicks and giggles. Nice job breaking my game!

EDIT: I misread what you said and thought you hadn't noticed the cheese thing was a bug, and I left it in on purpose since I could've just upped the spawn cycle or randomly set some as enemies. I had time to make it better but I just liked the idea of everything turning into my favorite source of calcium, I may fix the bug and recreate it as a feature someday.