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[yousayrandy]

Game "complete." Play it here: https://yousayrandy.itch.io/rescue-matters

Rescue Matters

An Arcade Top-Down Shooter About Rescuing Comrades

Game Development Blog

Introduction:

Who am I?: My name is Randy, a hobbyist game developer. You can find my introductory post at: https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=45.11660 I am not the most experienced of game developers, but I've dabbled enough to be able to (hopefully) complete this simple game I'm trying to make.

Why are you doing this?: Because I hate myself. Kidding! I love gaming, I've loved making them, and I want to keep doing it and get better at it. I am also fulfilling a promise to myself to complete a game jam every month for the year of 2022, and this game is March's contribution. I am documenting this process to help myself and others with the whole learning game development thing.

Game Outline, Day 1:

Preface: Rescue Matters is a game being developed for Game Job Live Game Parade Spring 2022 which you can find more info about here: https://itch.io/jam/game-parade-spring-2022 The theme of the jam is "EVERY LIFE COUNTS". I have seven days (roughly 6.5 at the time of this writing) to complete the game and submit it to the submission page. Since I am mainly doing the conceptualization of the game right now, it is inevitable that a lot of the game that is described here will change during its development (hence this section outlined as "Game Outline, Day 1."

Gameplay Summary: The game is an arcade top-down shooter. The player will start the level with the view of the main character in the middle of the screen from a bird's-eye view. You will be able to aim in the direction the mouse is facing, and shoot with clicking the left mouse button. Using WASD will move the character. The hook of the game will be that, when you die, you will use one of your stock of lives and start the level again, only this time, the body from your character of the previous run will still be there, and you have the option of going over and reviving them by walking over and pressing a button, probably the spacebar. That character will begin to revive with a timer (probably around 3 seconds), allowing your alive character to move into a different position. Once the character revives, he will receive input from the player once again, and you will have two characters (and, essentially, two guns at various locations) with which to shoot enemies. If both characters die, and you have an extra life, you spawn yet another character. The game will be about managing the risk-reward of your extra lives -- either keeping them as a safety net in case you die, or using them to revive previously dead characters to become stronger.

Story-wise, it won't make much sense. I don't know how I'm going to justify a resource that both revives a character and sends another one in. I also don't know how I'm going to justify an objective other than "get in there and get them out!" But the game won't be about getting out... so...

Details! They don't matter right now! I've got a game to make!

Player Experience Summary: Bullet-hell shooter. Explosive combat with strong, satisfying feedback. Risk-reward, skill vs. strategy.

Development: The game will be developed in Unity and coded in C#. A development log post will be posted at least daily (or, at least, there will be a blurb about each day I've worked on it in my posts). Work on the game will likely be limited due to the nature of my schedule (nights and weekends). I will have to look up several tutorials to get my desired features, but I do know enough to get started.

Aesthetics: Due to the nature of the game jam's time crunch (and my limited skillset), graphics will be intentionally minimalist. Likely high-contrasting colors, simple shapes. The audio will be very simple, likely sound effects I record with my microphone using my voice. Music will be public domain or license free or whatever the language is for "you can use this for free."

Prospective Development Priority List:

1. Conceptualize game (done!)
2. Develop foundational game mechanics using placeholder assets (the main level, the character movement/shooting, the reviving, basic enemies)
3. Develop gameplay assets, such as the accumulation of extra live, timers, so on)
4. Make this loop as satisfying as humanly possible
5. Add as many gameplay assets as possible
6. Implement more complete visual/audio assets
7. Playtest and bug fix
8. Polish
9. Submit Game

Whew!

[yousayrandy]

Update 1:
If anyone checked out my DevLog for "Stress CUPacity" (called "Stress Cup" in the DevLog), then you will see a lot of similarities in the initial post for that and for Rescue Matters. That is because, while I was writing the initial post for Rescue Matters, I determined that a lot of the sentiments were the same, so I largely copied and pasted that post to save time. I will not be doing that for these updates, but boy, doing a game jam from month to month means that not a whole lot has changed!

3/13/2022, Day 1: This was the day the theme was revealed and I came up with the initial concept, which you can find in the initial post in this topic. It took me forever to come up with it, so I didn't really start the "work" on the game until the following day. I remember being hungry for an actual video game with fun gameplay mechanics first and a "message" second, if at all. When the theme was revealed, my mind instantly jumped into conveying my personal beliefs into a game, which is not what I wanted to do this time. With that, I found it very hard to come up with something that 1) was a unique gameplay mechanic that fit the theme and 2) fell within my skillset to be able to complete in seven days. It was tough, but what I came up with is... possible, although out of my comfort zone since I've never made a game like this before. Or most types of games, if I'm being honest. But that was Day 1. Not a lot going on there.

3/14/2022, Day 2: I made this post after I slept on the concept of the game and decided it was worth pursuing. The name "Rescue Matters" for the concept is... okay. It has a double meaning of saying that the act of rescuing does matter, while also saying "here are the matters you will deal with while rescuing." It's like "Family Matters," only with soldiers and not super genius nerds who clone themselves.

After the post, I began work on the game right away. My "job" continues to be in a perpetual state of downtime, where I'm getting paid reasonable money to sit at a desk all day, so I have plenty of time to actually work on it. Which is good, because my home life has progressed to the point where I don't have ANY time to work on it in my free time. I guess I should feel blessed that I have a job that affords me that luxury.

I have a confession: I had no idea how to even begin making the game I concepted. I need a character to look at and shoot in the direction of the mouse cursor, so I headed to YouTube to look for some tutorials. I found a quick one by Brackeys that got me what I needed -- movement, shooting -- and nothing else, which was fine. I know how to do collisions and triggers and all that stuff, so I was able to handle that. I got a character moving how I wanted, so it was then time to try to implement the main mechanic of "reviving your dead body and controlling both of them." I placed another player object in the scene to make sure they both moved with input from the player, and they did. They also aimed in the right spot. Score! Now, they needed to be able to die.

The fun thing about game development, and jams in particular, as that the game will often evolve as you make it. I originally wanted a crazy action game with bullets everywhere and explosions and stuff, but as I was controlling those two characters, I thought, "What if there was friendly fire?" I set it up so the bullets could collide with the players, and set up a quick death state, and I realized that there was this fun strategic element of placing your characters in the a spot where you wouldn't shoot yourselves. That adds a lot more weight to the dynamic of using extra lives to revive them.

I set all of that up. Without getting into the specifics, I have currently: A player character that can move and shoot, even if there are multiple; an enemy that does nothing except takes hits, has health lowered, and dies (also kills the player if he walks into it); bullets that have adjustable damage; boundaries; a system where the player dies, an alive player can walk over to the "corpse," hit spacebar to initiate a revive, and the revive happens after a couple of seconds; a stats object that keeps track of lives.

That's a huge oversimplification of it, and there's plenty I'm forgetting, but that's more than enough to get going.

Reflections:
Pleasant Surprises: Once again, I'm dealing with a little bit of imposter syndrome, in that I'm still shocked that I have the knowledge and ability to get this stuff working as "quickly" as I do. If I could go back and tell my little fat boy self that one day, I could load up a game engine and get a functioning game prototype working in a handful of hours, I... would do that. And he would be surprised. I'm surprised now, as a no-longer-fat boy! I'm also surprised at how much potential for "fun" there is with this game. There's no way I'm going to have enough time to see this potential through, but having the foundations there will be super cool, and could lead to me going back to it in the future.

Challenges: Nothing major yet, just a few lines of code that I got stuck wording properly. The logic is all there in my head, it's just getting the syntax right. Every issue I ran into I was able to quickly find a solution for. I know there's going to be plenty of things coming up that will cause me problems, though.

What's Next?: I need enemies. There needs to be at least one basic, moving, shooting enemy to make this a complete game. If I can get that done today, everything else that I complete today will be a bonus. After that, those enemies need to randomly drop extra lives. Then, I can honestly say I will have enough of a game to submit, and it will just then be me spending the rest of my time making the game better. Wish me luck!

[yousayrandy]

Update 2:
I had a lot of fun working on the game yesterday, even if I did run into some hurdles. I'll get to that in a second, though. Today, I am really struggling to find the motivation to keep going with this game and the commitment to the year-long jam extravaganza as a whole. When stuff is going on in your personal life -- and for me, that's kind of constant right now -- the last thing you want to do is force yourself to do more WORK, no matter how fun that work might be. Every second I'm not occupied by obligations (which are few at this point), I'm thinking about ways to relax and destress. Instead, I have to bash my head against this game that has a crippling bug that is irritating me for no reward whatsoever.

Those are examples of fabrications you tell yourself that make your days worse. At the end of the day, I will submit something to this game jam. Will it be perfect? Heck no. But will I be proud of the work I was able to put into it? Did I learn a lot while making it? Is it one step toward a greater goal? Yes, yes, a thousand times yes. I will keep going. Now, for a summary of what happened yesterday:

3/15/2022, Day 3: During my last game jam, this was the day I determined that I would absolutely, without a doubt have a decent finished product by the end of the time period. This time, however, I am less sure. I started the day wanting to get enemies working. I got a "melee" enemy that runs right the player and kills them when it touches them, but the problem was that I have multiple players. Once the enemy focuses on one of the players in the scene,  how do I get it to focus on the other ones once it's killed one? I figured it out, but it took a while. Essentially, I made an array of all of the players in the scene, called the player's function of checking its alive status (which I had already made, thank goodness), and told the enemy to select a random player from that array to follow. If that player's alive status changes, it will run the function to find the focus again. It works, but it was a lot of time for very little reward.

The other thing is I wanted at least one more enemy. I think I can live with two enemies for this thing. The original enemy is weak, fast, and runs directly at the player. This new enemy will be slow, moves randomly, and shoots the player. Like a tank! So I made a tank.

I did it a lot faster than I thought. I copied a lot of the code from the player shooting and put it into the tank to get it to aim at the player, but the problem was that I couldn't have the body and the barrel of the tank rotate independently, so I made them separate children of a "tank" parent. There, I was able to attach the scripts to the individual parts, so movement/rotation was on the body, aiming as on the barrel. That worked really well, except...

Scripts on the children do not apply on the parent. What's worse, scripts on the parent override any scripts on the children. So... none of that works. It had a lot of very humorous and embarrassing effects doing it the way I originally did. So I'm left with a tank that moves the way I want it to, sort of, but doesn't do anything right from a collision or destruction standpoint. I think I know how to fix it, but I ran out of time yesterday to do so.

As it stands, this is the crappy game I have right now:


The green things are soldiers, the white circle with the pokey is the melee enemy, and the rounded square is the tank. This... is probably how the game is going to look, more or less. I just don't have the prowess to get the game running fast enough to spend any time on making it LOOK good, which sucks. Oh well!

Reflections:
Pleasant Surprises: I will say, though, the way I am able to logic code into existence never ceases to amaze me. I was talking to a software developer friend of mine and was able to talk shop with him in a way I never would have been able to before. I also came up with all of these solutions on my own, although I will give him credit for helping me find the syntax. That's still a great feeling.

Challenges: The stupid tank.

What's Next?: By the end of today, I need to fix the tank, and I need to get enemies to spawn randomly. Spawning random enemies might be easy, since my last game had a similar thing, but we'll see. I'm sure I'll run into something. Even I can even fix the stupid tank! If I can get that stuff done, though, I can at least feel comfortable that I will have at least the functioning game to submit.

[yousayrandy]

Update 3:
After the disheartening past few days, I decided to give myself a little break. This project, as well as the challenge for the year that I'm giving myself, is supposed to be enjoyable. I'm using this to become a better game developer, and experience the joy in sharing my creations with the world. I am not doing this to overwhelm myself and get myself down. I did put some work in, but I kept it to a minimum, as I took a break every time I started getting stressed. It's weird that I'm stressing myself out after making Stress CUPacity, a game about not stressing yourself out.

3/16/2022, Day 4: I told myself I wanted to fix the tank and get enemies to spawn randomly. I did those things, although running into more obstacles than I anticipated. At the end of the day, I couldn't figure out how to make the tank's barrel rotate independently from the tank parent, so I just said, "To heck with it," and made the body of the tank hold the scripts and the colliders. That had the side effect -- I believe I mentioned this before -- of having the parent not move along with the children. I decided that's fine. It's ugly, I'm sure it would cause problems in a game with a bigger scope, but I needed to move on. The only problem was that if I had the collider and the script to told the tank to die after its health reaches zero, only the body would die, and the barrel would hilariously remain and continue shooting at the player. I fixed this by changing the code to destroy the game object to destroy the game object's parent, which would destroy everything underneath it. Take that, obstacle! Except now the other enemy, which has no parent, no longer destroys itself. UGH!

Determined to continue on with this sloppy approach, I changed the other enemy to have a parent of its own, even though it was absolutely unnecessary for its function. Now, that enemy also got destroyed when he was shot, but had the same side effect of leaving his parent object behind as he moves along. Didn't care. Needed to get going.

Spawning enemies: That, of course, went a lot smoother. That logic just makes sense to me, and always has for whatever reason, and since I'm coming off of a game where there were multiple spawn points that would spawn enemies, I was able to do this fairly quickly. I even did it more efficiently and cleaner than last time, too. What I did was create a spawn point game object, set an array of possible enemy types to spawn (of which there are only two, but it's good practice), and told them to spawn a random one of the possible enemies assigned to it. This is done by a counter that, when it ticks zero, spawns an enemy and resets back to the max. The max is set to be a random range, so its a bit sporadic and hectic, which is what I want. That is all working as intended, although it needs some tuning and balancing, of course.

Other things I added that I didn't anticipate having time for: I got a menu screen -- that will double as the start menu where all the instructions are contained, and as the menu to "try again" if you have extra lives, because I hate doing menus and I'm lazy -- and even a difficulty adjustment. I've decided the game will be a "survive until timer reaches 0" game, so what I've done is created a difficulty float... or int... something, and told it to increase as the timer gets lower (based on percentages -- I think it goes up for every 10 percent of the timer that expires). As it is right now, that difficulty could be tied to many things, like drop chance of items or maybe types of enemies that could possibly spawn, but as it is right now, it just increases the rate at which enemies spawn (by lowering the maximum spawn timer). That is going to be good enough for the purposes of the jam, but I'm happy to see my logic thinking ahead to possible other inclusions, and knowing how I could take those approaches if I chose.

Morale is slightly higher than it was, and I need to keep telling myself that it will be okay.

Reflections:
Pleasant Surprises: I think the biggest surprise is how I'm now coding for flexibility and implementation. The "difficulty" thing, while not necessarily a conscious thought, was coded in such a way that it can be adjusted and implemented to affect many aspects of the game. That's just good forethought. I could have done a very specific "ADJUST THIS ONE THING AND NOTHING ELSE!" thing, but making a difficulty variable that can be applied mathematically to any mechanic is a way better approach. The fact that I intuitively did that from the start -- as in, that was my immediate first choice -- means I'm improving as a designer and a programmer. Even as I type this, I am thinking of new ways I could apply that difficulty variable. That's something I could convey to anybody, set up in the inspector to adjust easily, and so on. I'm very happy with how I did that.

I wish it was articulated better in game development-related inspirational material. It's not unlike learning an instrument. When you first start out, you're literally thinking about every single aspect of it, and it's slow, painful, boring. But over time, the things you were struggling with start to become second nature, and then you start to struggle with the next higher aspect of learning. Eventually, all of the "basics" that you were struggling with will be something you don't even think about. I think that's really cool.

Challenges: I keep running into unanticipated bugs, but there haven't been any I couldn't squash relatively quickly. The biggest challenges I've been experiencing is the stress I'm placing on myself with the things I'm telling myself, and that's unacceptable. I need to be better.

What's Next?: If I can just get the core game loop complete -- extra lives dropping/obtainable by the player, win/lose screens, working singletons, HUD, etc. -- I will be extremely happy, because then I could just submit and wrap up. That would be super, duper rad, and would alleviate so much stress. But I'm happy that I'm that close to it anyway. Let's see what I can do today.

[yousayrandy]

Update 4:
I'm actually surprised that this game is turning out to be a bigger rollercoaster of emotions than my last one, which was kind of about the rollercoaster of emotions in a way. Who woulda thunk it?

Writing yesterday's update boosted morale quite a bit. It's always good putting into perspective just what you're telling yourself versus what is reality. The reality is I'm working hard on this and I've come a long way. Seeing that I coded the difficulty in such a way that it could be implemented beyond what I originally intended it for was a confidence booster. Typing this stuff out has proved useful in that aspect, so it's good that I'm doing it, because I'm struggling once again today.

This is more due to my personal life, but it is definitely getting harder and harder to stay motivate at the start of each day. I wake up with this malaise and dread. The only way I'm getting through each moment is reminded myself of the stuff that is coming soon that give me a modicum of joy -- seeing my family, eating (I'm a former fat boy), exercising -- but those things are increasingly few and far between, so it's tough sometimes.

The good news is, as you'll read in a moment, is that I got the game to a state where I could submit it and it would be a fully functional beginning-to-end game. That has removed a lot of my stress. I still have 2-3 days that I can work on it, but even if I find myself too overwhelmed to keep at it, I can just submit it as is and be proud of the experience I made.

Let's get to discussing where the game actually is.

3/17/2022, Day 5: Enough moping around. Let's get to the good stuff. The "game" is "done." You can start it up, hit play, play it, repeat until you win or lose, and start again. All of that works. The game I originally concepted at the start of this jam exists as I more-or-less intended it. There were a few tweaks (that I may still change), but overall, the summary that I gave is the game that I have. That's really cool. And it's cool I was able to pull it off.

I had to get all the menus working, and I did. I hate working on menus. I think they're super boring. As it is, they're plain text with plain buttons, and that is likely where they will stay. I just can't be bothered to spend more time on that aspect than I do, because it just bores me to tears. "Functioning" is good enough for what I need, and it functions.

All the spawn points work, although I may rework them. As it is right now, I have a bunch of spawn points placed around the screen right off camera, and enemies will randomly spawn between the two enemy types at a random interval (adjusted by difficulty). As it is right now, the game becomes very hectic, very quickly. Enemies come flying out like crazy. I kind of wanted a more strategic game, so I might have to dial back the hectic nature of the spawning, and maybe increase the enemy health. That would probably work better for what I'm going for anyway, because the more soldiers you have alive that you're controlling, the more damage you're capable of dealing.

I did originally have friendly fire on, but with the hectic nature of the game as it stands, it was too much, so I disabled it. I might dial it back knowing that there will be fewer enemies with bigger health. It would make the placement of your soldiers and your aiming more to the forefront than just dodging and frantically shooting. Typing all of that makes me think that's the right move, so that's probably what I'm going to spend my time on coming up.

I was also able to add the actual whole point of the game, which is gaining "extra lives" and spending them to revive comrades. I came up with a dumb story, which I will show you here:

Couple of political jabs in there. I couldn't resist.

[Note: It is beginning to depress me how incapable I am of spending the time on aesthetics. Perhaps I will focus on that next time.]

As you can see, I came up with a somewhat justifiable reason for the gameplay, and a very inaccurate reason as to why reviving and respawning use the same resource. It gets the job done, and I'm happy I was able to come up with context in a couple of minutes.

Naturally, extra lives take the form of "batteries." They randomly spawn from enemies (which just works!) after you kill them, and walking over them picks them up and adds to your "battery charges" total. All of that stuff works and sort of makes sense, so I'm pleased.

The game has an onscreen timer that ticks down -- "evac," as it says up there -- and you win if you survive until it hits zero. If you don't, you lose. Simple enough, eh? But hey, the whole thing works. Wrap it up, boys!

Except no, lots of balancing and polish needs to be done. Let's get to it.

Reflections:
Pleasant Surprises: The thing I haven't really discussed is how this game is surprisingly fun. It feels good to move and shoot. The enemies are unpredictable enough to be challenging, but not so much as to be unfair. Even without sound or any good effects, hitting them with bullets gives a nice feeling of feedback, for whatever reason. Giving sound and some effects will help that a lot, too.

Challenges: I kept running into stupid mistakes I was making, like colliders doing the wrong thing, or objects being assigned to the wrong layers. I've done it before, and it happens, but it was definitely annoying. There are also a few bugs that I can't recreate to save my life, and they only happen occasionally. Specifically, there's a bug where one of the characters the player controls has his movement get all wonky out of nowhere. I don't know what's causing it, but it happens so infrequently that I'm not sure it matters. It does matter, but I can't get lost on it.

What's Next?: Playtesting, balance, tuning, polish, sound effects, visual effects. I like game design and balance, but that other stuff? Boring. Let's see how it goes.

[yousayrandy]

Update 5:
I'm not going to repeat the existential crisis and self-deprecating statements I've made previously, even though they still hold true. If you want to see that, go see previous updates.

3/18/2022, Day 6: The overwhelming majority of the game was "working," with all of the features in place. All I needed to do was balance and fix bugs, which I did a lot of. The only problem was, during the course of this, I 1) found more bugs, 2) created more bugs.

I recreated the way the spawning worked, which didn't take long, but then it made an issue where the game was either laughably easy or impossibly hard. I kept changing values like mad to make it flow better, and I just couldn't get it together. I decided that I still had one more full day to work on it (and part of the following day), so I needed to take a break.

3/19/2022, Day 7: Most days are busy for me, but weekends are especially packed for most of it, followed by complete, calming freedom right near the end of the day. I wasn't able to even so much as think about the game until the kids were in bed, so I waited, and then after everything was settled, I told myself that I wasn't sleeping until I finished it and published it.

Except that didn't happen. I just couldn't get the game to be any fun. The balance was all off, the whole point of the game was lost on the difficulty, there were bugs galore. It was just a mess. But I wanted to wash my hands of it, so I published it on the website and try to submit it to the jam. What I didn't realize is that the jam REQUIRES a gameplay video (as well as a few other things) in order to submit, which I was not prepared to do and, by the time I realized the requirement, was too tired to actually make one. I decided to wait until the following day to make the video and went to bed around midnight.

3/20/2022, Day 8: And if anybody's reading this, they're thinking, "Midnight? That's not late." Right, except for when you have a baby that doesn't want to sleep. Including this day, where he decided to wake up three hours after I went to bed and refused to go back to sleep. I figured getting up was better than just lying awake in bed, so I did that, grabbed the baby, and threw a bottle of milk at him and just kind of zoned out with a little mini-meltdown. Yes, I know "zoned out" and "meltdown" don't really go together, but whatever.

With the child consuming milk, I decided to try to tweak the game some more, since I now had an overabundance of time that was no longer going to be occupied with restorative sleep. I opened the game, and just had to think: "What is it I'm trying to accomplish?" Well, I want the revive mechanic to be the main focus, so I made the game START with the ability to revive, so now players will instantly know what's going on. Then, the reviving needs to help you overcome problems that you wouldn't be able to do without the aid of your comrades. Okay, so enemies need to take more hits. But then the enemies would overwhelm you, and reviving was too difficult. This was resolved with lowering the move speed and decreasing the amount of enemies that spawned. There was this glitch that made the player movement sporadic and hard to control, so I fixed that (while causing a different, less-intrusive bug).

At this point, the game was still not perfect, but you can play it and get the point. With time basically depleted, I resolved to just reupload the game and submit it (after making my gameplay video, of course). I did that and went about my day, starting with checking my email.

I saw in my inbox that I had a message on itch from the organizers of the game jam. The message basically equated to, "Remember, after the deadline, you have four additional days of balancing and bug fixing, as long as you don't add features." Oh...

Well...

Okay.

So the game isn't "done" to what I'd like it to be. I may not have time to make it what I want it to be, but I will, hopefully, at least get in there and tweak it around. I already have one comment on it that basically says it's trash and too easy and I should die. That might be an exaggeration.

If you'd like to play the game in its current state, you can do so here, but be sure to do it soon as it might be updated later: https://yousayrandy.itch.io/rescue-matters

Reflections:
Pleasant Surprises: Not a whole lot, unfortunately.

Challenges: Getting the balance right. I'm still struggling with this, and will likely struggle until I'm completely out of time.

What's Next?: Just... I need to keep telling myself that the goal isn't to make the best game ever. The goal is to make a game, learn, improve. That's what I've done. So I will continue to tell myself that and be proud that I got this done in a week on my own. And I don't think it's absolute trash. I will also try to dedicate some time to balancing before the TRUE deadline.

[yousayrandy]

Final Thoughts:
This jam did not go as well as I was hoping, and not nearly as "well" as the last one did. I was pretty proud of what I made during the last one -- at the very least, someone playing it would have an "Oh, I get it!" moment in a way that I don't think Rescue Matters conveys. I was debating not even thinking about this ever again or updating this log. I was thinking I wouldn't even play the other games in the jam because I didn't want to be reminded of it. All in all, I was feeling pretty low about it.

At the end of the day, though, I did it. I made a game in seven days, and I am a better game developer today than I was before I made it. It's unpolished, unbalanced, buggy, and ugly, but it's more than most people on this Earth can say they created. I'm proud of that aspect, at least. I guess the part where I've made a handful of games now means the luster of making one wears off a little bit. It's still an accomplishment, and I still enjoy the process, even if it doesn't pan out the way I hoped.

You can play the game here: https://yousayrandy.itch.io/rescue-matters

I intentional chose a laid back jam for April, because I could do with a break with less pressure. The jam is designed to give you seven days to work on your game spread across the entire month in however way you choose. That's more my speed! I'll make a new devlog when that starts, which is this weekend I believe.