And now... Fireworks!

Tools down! 

OK, I am exhausted. I don't really want to try to write much here...

But! So many things happened since the last log! So, I'll try to summarize a bit...

Got all the pause stuff fully straightened out. So you can pause the game when needed, and it does the right thing. That's good, because I needed it sorted for the level editor.

Ah... The level editor. The holy friggin' grail... And I figured out various bugs and worked my way through a lot of problems (some of them, my own creation -- like initially trying to specify location and size of things in tile cells). But! I kept at it, and eventually, it stayed up! Well, it worked, at least. So now, when you hit the "e" key while playing, it clamps you to the current phrase (so you can build off it if you like), relocates everything so it's zeroed against the left side of the screen. It also does some other stuff like stop the music playing and setting a raft of new keybindings.

It turned out once I started keeping track of what was selected in the E-S, it was easy to not just delete things, but make it you can move existing entities around the layout (shift-arrow key, you're welcome). I also got the "save" working (hit the spacebar and check the web console -- you'll see JSON describing the layout, which you can paste into the %data.js file).  I was able to quickly design and run out another seven layouts an hour and a half before the end of the jam!

And what did I do with the rest of that hour and a half?

Well, you remember (if you read the presentation) that one of the inspirations for Canned Heat was particle system data structures. I got fireworks happening for the credits page. I only had to create a cute little function to add the particle entities into the Store. The existing systems took care of the rest! If you're in a source reading mood, check out how I set it up the firework repeat. I'm gonna' be smug about that one for days...

In between all this, I painted a cool opening image with some nice clouds. I thought it might be interesting to have Kat run across the road in the picture at random intervals and speeds. And yes, with fifteen minutes or so left, I did that. I had to add one special-purpose System to deal with the animation and rollover, but the rest of it was already taken care of.

I created all the artwork during the jam period -- the sprite sheet (Krita and Inkscape), as well as the title, game and credit background images. There were also some development sketches and such, but since they're not in the assets pack, I won't count 'em! I looked hard (in some cases, maybe a bit too hard...) for existing artwork I could use, but since I was using a weird tilesize it didn't work out. In the long run, it was satisfying to be able to put that together, even though it took extra time. (I make no apologies for my purple Kat... It's a placeholder! ; - ).

And lastly, as far as stuff that went right -- my "punchlist" was invaluable for setting priorities and making sure that I got all the important stuff done before noodling away on the fun-but-invisible stuff.