Hey I guess I should use this devlog function.

Refactor is an album I did back in 2015, as part of trying to get back into making electronic music. Many of the tracks started out as game soundtracks of their own.

Fast forward to 2017, and I burned out on the tech industry and decided I wanted to make games and music and comics full-time. One of the ideas that's been rattling around in my brain for a long time is making a minigame collection around the album Refactor, retroactively making Refactor into an OST for a minigame collection.

I kept on putting off actually starting on this project, though, but then eevee hosted a game jam that was timed just right to finally light a fire under my butt to actually start on this ridiculously ambitious project.

So, for the purpose of Games Made Quick 1.5 (why didn't she call it "Summer Games Made Quick?" Who knows!) I decided to start on it finally, and where better to start than track 1?

So, right now I'm working on Little Bouncing Ball. This is one of the tracks that was originally for a game jam game that didn't get completed. The original concept of the game was "A game of pong with four players where the rules of the game change throughout each match." The dev team making the game bit off way more than they could chew and didn't get more than a basic prototype going, but they had some fun ideas. I am not using any of those ideas.

Instead, I intend to build something that's like a cross between Arkanoid and BIT.TRIP BEAT, where different balls, enemies, and blocks have different mechanics, and those mechanics appear based on the state of the music. Unlike BIT.TRIP, the music does not react to your progress, and also I intend for the level to always go to completion; your skill merely affects your score. (Some other games in the collection will likely have more dynamic gameplay-driven music however. That said I could also eventually make Little Bouncing Ball dynamically-generated, given that I originally built the song for that use case in the first place!)

Anyway, obviously there's still a lot left to do on this; I've spent most of my time building out a rough skeleton of things, and building a few gameplay rules and then, well, refactoring it to make it more flexible. For now I'm just going to focus on making LBB good on its own, but one next step will be to have an overlay system that switches between levels and so on. You can see the very very tiniest beginnings of that by pressing 'P' - the pause functionality is driven by the top-level game controller and not by the game itself.

My main goals for what to finish over the course of the jam:

• Rough gameplay for all song segments, with placeholder visuals
• Some niceties from the top-level controller (pause screen/visual effect, "now playing" overlay as appropriate)
• Some minor visual effects for Little Bouncing Ball

Stretch goals:

• Menu system for switching tracks
• Maybe some sprites?
• Better paddle physics (I don't want to use box2d if I can help it, but if I have to, I will!)