Today I officially begin work on my entry for the PunkJam!
I call it:
Nano-Phage Zero
First Day
Came up with a name for my entry: Nano-Phage Zero
I unfortunately don’t have any graphics or cool gameplay demo for it yet. I did work on a title screen but hated it so I deleted it.
Theme: Cyberpunk
Genre: Adventure, Story, Hacking
Based in a near-future unnamed suburb. Our hero is a tech reclamation specialist that collects recyclable technology from garbage that is dumped from the City Center into the suburbs. He comes across some technology which is known as Green Scrap.
Green Scraps are notoriously difficult to come by, and insanely valuable. Used only by the highest elite in the City Center. Nobody is sure of its origins.
The Green Scraps the hero comes across is unfortunately tainted with NanoPhage, and our hero quickly begins to develop strange symptoms.
[The story begins]
Our hero goes on a quest to the City Center to attempt to find the origins of the Green Scrap in order to find a cure for NanoPhage.
The NanoPhage begins to give our hero the ability to hack Green Scrap technology, which he will use to further his quest.
Choices matter. Depending on how you play, and the decisions you make, will determine our hero’s ultimate fate.
Hack, Explore, Sneak your way to discovering the secrets of Green Scraps in the City Center.
Second Day
Coming to terms with my art style for this. Thinking very simplified Tron inspired. Heavy bright coloured outlines with very basic detailing. The cities are going to look sweet 
Haven’t quite decided on a name for the main character yet.
I also am working on the hacking mini-game mechanics. If anyone has ever played Fantasy Life, it will be inspired by that. I’m thinking it will be a button mashing timed chaos scene, with NO PRESS moments and a race to “hack” your way into devices around the world.
Day Three
The progress is slow but real.
I now have an initial room where I’m testing out the mechanics and still learning the TAS system. Thanks to @FManga and his P-type game I am learning even more of how to integrate Tiled maps! It is really awesome, and can help rapidly develop more complex things. (For now I am only using it for collision detection and for finding “hackable” objects)
I built a state enum to manage game state. Right now it switches between the Intro, HACKING and EXPLORING. Can be seen more on my github repo:
I fixed my character sprite having his arm backwards when walking left (lol whoops).
Still developing story behind the scenes, yes the art is intentionally goofy like this for a reason 
hopefully it makes sense when folks start playing and learn why.
I haven’t yet gotten the hacking mini game developed. But it is going to be pretty simple. I’m planning a button mashing type minigame where a button will appear on the screen and the player will have to smash the button until a meter fills. The player will need to finish all of the “progress” bars before the time runs out and the system kicks the player out of the hacking mode (not sure if there will be consequences yet besides starting the hacking over).
I’m pretty excited about where this is going to go 
Day Four
Added MIT license. I think this is the first time I’ve used that, that I can remember anyway. Up on my github repo post from day 3.
Added BUTTONS! This is a good thing. It means I will soon be able to actually flesh out the full mechanic for the hacking minigame. Which I did start planning out. It can sort of be seen in the gif above:
There will be a “progress bar” for how far the player has hacked. This bar will be filled by the player pressing the correct buttons when prompted (A, B or C) if the player presses the wrong button progress will pause/reverse a little, if the player presses on the NO PRESS then the progress again pauses or reverses.
There will also be fun fx that go along with it 
I hope fun anyway.
Day Five
Finally getting some minigame action going. Super early prototype and everything. Needs flashy fx and such still. And I’m not quite feeling the buttons yet (needs to be randomized for sure, and this means less penalties xD)
Now with at least a moving prototype up for the minigame, I’ll try and make some headway on an intro scene that kicks off the story. That’ll be fun
(That progress bar took me way longer than it should have to make xD)
Day Six
Wow, almost a whole week already! Incredible.
Today I got a lot of amazing feedback from some folks about my Hacking Minigame, so I started prototyping some better systems:
The game will now have 2 (so far) minigame types, explained in the story as well!
- The first will be for scenarios in the case that the system (whichever device you’re hacking) fights back! This will be the button smashing action minigame in which you have to rapidly press the given button to fill the progress bar, all the while it is being filled by the other end by the enemy system! So be quick!
- The other system will be based on the above gif prototype. The system is being monitored but is unaware of your presence. You need to be very accurate in pressing in the given randomly generated sequences. Wrong move and the system will detect your presence and kick you out immediately!
During development I might come up with other types as well, but so far these are the two I’ll work on pushing to completion. They also fit in to the story mode perfectly as having one be a brute force attack against a defending system, and the other being a more stealthy precision based hack with a system being monitored very carefully.
With these prototypes more fleshed out, I can finally start developing out the story mode more and make some more world maps! I was always a major fan of the zelda room based dungeons, so I’ll probably base this adventure off of that a little and have the progression based on “zones” or “rooms” (there will be a tower )
As always, code is pushed to the linked Github page above if anyone wants to poke around at my very ugly play code
Day Seven
Full week! Wow! Wish I could have more progress than I do, but with how little time I have I am actually impressed with myself (is that so bad?) Working with C++ has been a real joy, though if anyone looks at my github they may notice that I write in a very broken C++ that looks clearly like a Java guy doesn’t know what he is doing. Because that’s what it is lol.
@tuxinator2009 has once again graced me with some fantastic aid in debugging and suggestions, allowing me to progress much quicker into finishing up today’s work!
Sequence hacking mode now has a Sentinel which is constantly watching for intruders! Beneath this ominous floating eye is the Threat level! In this mode, each time you enter the wrong button in the sequence the threat level increases and the Sentinel slowly becomes aware of your presence. So watch out!
Will need to then finish up the brute force hacking mode next. Then on to the story! Super excited to start putting that into the game I have so far, it is going to be so cool I might have to even work out writing a little booklet or something with backstory and post game filler or something.
Day Eight
Lots of minor cleanup done today! Doesn’t feel so minor, but it looks minor in the gif:
- Collisions now look better, as you don’t have to stand on top of the terminal to hack it (heh whoops).
- The door is now only one tile wide, because it looks better.
- Modified the hint text at the top of the screen a little. This is still going to be changed around.
- Set up some prototyping for the Brute Force hacking mode. More to show later (need to do some quick art for the enemy progress bar)
- Cleanup of code, which includes adding two tutorial modes. The intro screen will be cleaned up eventually and made much prettier with graphics and such.
I might start working on Audio (sfx and music) next. I didn’t really spend enough time on those in the last few jams and it really made me feel like my games weren’t very complete.
Day Nine
Closer to finishing the Brute Force hacking mini game. I’d still like to add a few fun fx and such around button smashing etc…
Not really much else to show for today’s work. Just the virus and the progress bar for the enemy that you race against.
Day Ten
Only progress today has been by making the itch.io game page and submitting to the Jam.
https://torbuntu.itch.io/nano-phage-zero
Day Eleven
Thanks to @carbonacat I was able to actually start moving code into a more pleasant structure. I started by breaking out my Sequence Hack mini game into its own files. Now that I sort of know what I am doing, I can start moving the other mini game BruteForce into its own files as well.
I will be replacing my Progress bar with the TASUI Gauge eventually. That will be super exciting I think I will be able to do a lot more cool stuff once I do that!
Learning C++ more and more lately has been a real treat. Definitely want to thank everyone in the Pokitto community for being so helpful and encouraging in this endeavor
Day Twelve
Moved all mini game code into their own files now. Much cleaner! So much easier to work with too.
I started working on another map and playing with how to transition. Turns out I’ll need to redo the entirety of the logic I have for map states and how to manage where the player is in the game. Not a problem, I knew it was coming.
I was able to transition to the new map and walk around. So that is good! Now I can actually build out the “path” the player takes on the adventure from start to finish. Starting to plan out how to do the multi ending
Nothing really new for showing today. A GIF of the same thing as the other days won’t be too special, since it doesn’t show how much nicer the code is xD
Day Thirteen
Good day was had! I updated a lot of the graphics with minor detailing.
- The C button now has a more oval shape representing the Pokitto C button.
- The walls were made into full 16x16 tiles, without the odd cut offs.
- I added a start for the Robot sprite.
- I also added an “empty” button icon.
- updated the Door to be a Sprite instead of a simple tile.
Did some clean up of the code again. Starting to slowly get the hang of the little bits of C++ I’m picking up. The community has REALLY been helping out a ton.
I got map swapping taken care of and cleaned up thanks to @FManga.
New hacking mini game! Robot Programmer!
One of the original ideas I had was that hacking would involve, much like Zachtronics’ EXA Punks, programming little viruses to do your bidding. I decided this was too close to the same game, and I didn’t want to remake that game. So I abandoned it altogether. But then I saw a pre-release announcement for a game that reminded me of Post Bot! And @Vampirics said I should put that in my game as a hacking type. So here I am adding it in as the third and final hacking mini-game
The plan is that in this mini-game you will find robot centers in the world, obviously in order to progress you’ll need to program the robots to do your bidding in the rooms/other side of the walls. Tasks such as “go stand on a button” or “move the X onto the X and then go pick up Y” or whatever.
Robot will have a single inventory slot. Robot will have different number of available instructions depending on the puzzle. Nothing too seriously challenging, maybe…
So that totals the mini games into the 3 types:
- Sequence: for opening doors, accessing areas, etc… This game involves matching the given sequence as accurately as possible without tripping the sentinel. Consequences to follow.
- Brute Force: for stopping security drones, disabling security cameras, etc…
- Robot Programming: instructing robots to solve puzzles.
I am super excited about this. I think it has some great potential depending on how things go I might even have to take this post-jam to flesh out even more. We will see how far I can get in the jam!
During a walk I also solidified a “game plan” for how I am going to work out the story adventure part of the game while maintaining the scope possible to actually complete it in the month we have left. This is going to be so much fun.
Day Fourteen
The robot is alive!! Sort of
The robot is now programmable! Will need a bit of tweaking to work nicer, but the general idea is getting there
Day Fifteen
Tidied up a lot of the code for the mini games. The Robot hacking minigame now takes place in what are called Minibot Fields, for the story they are experimental testing grounds for Pre-nano technology (microbots) which is where they can test in a more controlled environment before shrinking the tech down even further into nano tech (which comes into play obviously later). Not sure how realistic this is, but it is Cyberpunk SciFi, so what I say goes right?
The programming is much easier now and puzzles can be created more reasily as well. The robot will have a register for inventory, and the UI I will need to create still for that. Right now the first puzzle will simply be programming the robot to move onto the button to open the door to the next area. The primary goal of these puzzles however will be fore unlocking more secret areas and “hack logs” which will be the primary source of driving the story (Thanks @tuxinator2009 for bringing up that idea!)
Pretty excited where this is heading!!
Day Sixteen
No fancy pictures or anything to show. Today was all working on code. I’m trying to refactor the main system in order to make world creation much more streamlined. I’ve got a plan now so this shouldn’t be too much trouble, and once set up I can rapidly develop fun levels with different puzzles etc… as well as more content in general without worrying about mechanics
Using the TMX Events definitely helps out keeping the code more clean and flexible. I set up a few tiles to act as the hacking type event Sequence, Robot, Bruteforce so this way level data can be abstracted a bit in order to simplify the process of adding levels. Hopefully no changes to the core system will need to take place after it is all set up once.
Day Seventeen
Getting some progression going to test out the state and level systems I’m working on. So far it is looking pretty usable. Needs some tweaking on the robot hacking minigame to set up puzzles of course. But everything else is coming together.
Need to put a transition scene between the factory and the “tower” that the player is exploring/climbing/hacking etc…
Need some story elements started too soon. Such as the hack logs I’m going to have in the player’s inventory.
Thinking I may need to just pull the newest PokittoLib for TAS UI instead of just waiting for a femtoIDE update xD…
Today I added a handful of more levels and reworked how they work in the main state system. Hopefully I can use this to make a few more levels and then the “final” level. So depending on how much space I have left we will see how “big” the tower gets.
I still need to finalize the art (I’m thinking new tiles for the tower to differentiate, of course) and work on audio.
Day Eighteen
Overhauled the robot hacking minigame. It works much better now, and actually works as a mini game puzzle system randomly generated and everything. Kept it pretty simple though. The idea for this mini-game will be to collect Hack Logs which will progress the story.
Did a little bit of other work on starting to set up the Hack Log system. The idea being that the player will be able to access a menu to read through the logs as they collect them. Which is where the story will live.
Day Nineteen
Today was mostly code edits. With some refactoring I was able to reduce a lot of repetitive code, which feels great! With more thanks to @FManga I was able to get the LevelManager to be even more useful in setting sprites based on events in the tmx files making the level generating process a whole lot smoother and more automated. Which will help reduce the overall amount of time it will take to set up content.
code snippet
using GetEnum = MapEnum (*)(uint32_t, uint32_t);
void LevelManager::setMap(const uint8_t* map, GetEnum num){
tilemap.set(map[0], map[1], map+2);
for(int i=0; i<sizeof(tiles)/(POK_TILE_W*POK_TILE_H); i++){
tilemap.setTile(i, POK_TILE_W, POK_TILE_H, tiles+i*POK_TILE_W*POK_TILE_H);
}
hasBotfield = false;
hasDrone = false;
drone.play(securityDrone, SecurityDrone::active);
for(int x = 0; x < 14; ++x){
for(int y = 0; y < 11; ++y){
auto tile = num(x,y);
if( tile == Drone ){
dX = x * POK_TILE_W;
dY = y * POK_TILE_H;
hasDrone = true;
droneActive = true;
}
if(tile == Botfield ){
bfX = x * POK_TILE_W + 8;
bfY = y * POK_TILE_H + 8;
hasBotfield = true;
}
}
}
}
Still just a work in progress, but eventually this will be pretty automatic so that I can make the whole level in Tiled and then the code will be able to manage it all without any code changes
So after all that, I just need to get the hack log system figured out and put in place, then do a bunch of audio, then fix up the art and add a new mini tileset for the tower. Then I’m close to done!
Day Twenty
Brute force hacking is now used to deactivate security drones! Beware, if you enter their field of vision, the map restarts!
Made a few other adjustments to the maps as well.
Now I can work on details and audio
I know I keep saying audio, but I will add audio.
Day Twenty-one
Just a quick playthrough of what I’ve got so far, minus a few things.
Did some map redesigns today. I worked on a title screen but that chewed up all my space so I am scrapping that until I finish “the game” then I’ll make whatever fits
I am working on reinstalling my audio tools (FL Studio) so that I can start on audio this week now that everything else is falling into place.
Spoiler
I was trying to find a way to make the robo programming more exciting and varied. @carbonacat asked if there would be moving objects such as viruses in the game. Which, of course, there is
Been working on a little treat where the same virus from the brute force mini game is trying to sabotage the minibot field.
It will move both the Key and the Minibot around on contact! So beware.
This adds an extra element of strategy to the program you’ll need to write. You can utilize the pattern of the virus to move quicker (since it pushes you) or you can time it right to collect the key as it pushes it towards you. It is definitely more fun now
The key is also a required item to progress. As now the doors are locked and the access to unlock them is behind a security locked terminal, which is unlocked via the access keycard you get from the minibot fields.
I think I’m getting to a decent place. Things to wrap up:
- Hack Log obtaining system. Finish up figuring out how players will collect the Hack Logs.
- Hack Log interface. I need to design the view for reading through the Hack Logs.
- Audio for SFX and one or two songs.
- Finish the Elevator scene for selecting floors and a system to determine which floors are locked.
- Create a transition screen between the tutorial factory and the tower.
- Final floor and end scene(s).
- Title Screen.
After that it is all just finishing up and tightening up the code
Day Twenty-Two
Learned how to add SFX in C++ today. Going to make a handful more of those, nothing fancy, just blips and bloops.
I got my setup all complete so I can start working on music too! Then I’ll work out how to stream from SD card.
Fixed a few bugs with robot minigame initialization.
Got too antsy and pulled in the latest PokittoLib so I can play with TASUI >_< loving it so far!
Will be updating my gauges to use the TASUI gauge instead so I can have more complete feedback.
Day Twenty-Three
Ok, seriously the TASUI is amazing! I’m now using it for a major part of my dialog and menu systems and it is so easy to work with! And looks great really blends with my aesthetic also! haha
Today I overhauled the majority of the UI to use TASUI (instead of my clunky sprites which weren’t working right anyway)
Spoilers
I added some more sfx and continued to just fix up minor bugs that crept up as I moved code around 
was a lot of fun.
Making a large project in C++ has definitely been an adventure! And hopefully I can finish this up and polish before the end xD
Things still needing to be done:
- 2 maps (one more tower floor and the final level)
- the elevator scene, which will more than likely be TASUI
- 2 or 3 songs.
- hack logs!! Lots of hack logs.
- multi ending system (planning for 2 endings for sure, possibly a 3rd as well.)
- Transition system.
- Title Screen.
Day Twenty-Four
Finally made some more progress today. I actually did some changes over this week, but today I am making the log, so it is day twenty four.
The major progress is to the hack log implementation. (see spoilers).
I also rewrote a lot of code to switch from the int main system to use the void init() and void update() instead, leading to some nice cleanup.
More Spoilers
Still a lot to get done in the last 10 days here, but it is coming together, the end is near!!
Day Twenty-Five
Starting to wrap up! Added a small title tune. Added a handful more logs. Starting to work out the story now in the logs. Will definitely need a solid play-through before it is all done!
Since I couldn’t stand looking at all the horrible duplication I made, I rewrote a lot of stuff into smaller broken down methods to reduce the majority of duplicate code.
Worked on making the title screen. Going super simple here, just some animated text and a “load bar”.
Still to do yet before “done”:
- 2 maps (lvl 3 and the final level)
- Elevator map and controls for selecting a floor
- Finish up the hack logs
- write up the multiple endings
- Possible transition system
- Title screen finalized.
Day Twenty-Six
Finalized on 3 tracks today. 1 for title screen, 1 for the intro facility and 1 for the tower. Made a toggle in the Hack Log for disabling the music or enabling it.
Made an animation for when a Hack Log is collected. Just so players know to check the log when they see it
Added another map! So just the final one remaining, which will include the end-game choice of which ending will occur.
Spoiler alert!
Things left to finish:
- final map and ending!
- Elevator scene with controls for selecting a map
- Multi ending scenarios
- Hack Logs of course
- Possible transition system
- Finalize title screen (add background images)
Day Twenty Something
Today I was gifted a lot of extra spare time, and so I spent that hammering away as much as possible to finish up my entry. I’ve gotten REALLY close to being satisfied with the overall mechanics and “game play”. A few things need to be buttoned up, and I’ll explain at the end of this log.
I now have a start, and a finish, and an adventure to get through from one to the other!
I have an ELEVATOR! WOOHOO!
Elevator Scene
I added a bunch of new environmental items, such as tables and chairs and a bit of electronics chips just laying around (some help the story )
I added a new Computer with a fancy interface on it, that one is a fun nod to a certain recent release.
Added a bunch more Hack Logs, but there are still a bunch more to make to finish up. I am just under half, and I’m considering cutting it back a bit I may have too much room set for logs.
Now! Things still to finish up:
- Clean up the end scenarios and add the skill/hack based endings
- Hack Logs need finishing up
- Finalize the Elevator scene (there are a number of TODO items here including music)
- Finalize title screen (Add tower in the background)
- Possible transition system between maps.
I have a few more TODO items in the code somewhere, but this is what I remember off the top of my head.
The jam is coming to an end and I don’t know how much time I’ll have left this week to work on this, so I’m glad I was able to hammer away so much of it tonight!
