Safety build for GDTV 2023 Jam


This is the first upload of Krumbles the Cookie! A rogue lite adventure game where you play as a sentient chocolate chip cookie!

It is currently full of physics and movement bugs but no crashes in testing so far.  It does have a pause menu where you can exit and also just restart in case you get "soft locked".  There is no sound yet but this is planned to be added before the jam: free music CC(X) licensing, SFX, and some voice acting by yours truly.  I will also try to add some VFX for crumbling and hits. Also will try to decorate the outside of the house area a bit as there are still some world grid materials that are visible when you complete the game.


What I learned from last year's jam is to include just one level as it takes too much time to design, test, and populate multiple levels when you are also building gameplay mechanics.  I also made sure to not include too many mechanics in this jam.


Some things that had to be cut but were planned: main menu, HUD and oven count down timer, catapult mechanic, on screen tutorial, an ant swarm enemy, animation for Krumbles (very sadly), options menu, water soaking in sink.

As most jam projects, I had to cut out a lot of initial scope and won't be able to include everything I wanted in the original jam version.  My first big mistake was trying to create my own UPawnMovementComponent in Unreal trying to do something crazy with the movement by restricting things to the "2D" nature of the theme "Life in 2D". I quickly realized how hard it is to create good movement controls and how many things the UCharacterMovement does for you.  Just looking at the code it's well over 2000 lines.  I lost about 1.5 days starting with the APawn base class and creating my own movement mechanic that was not to my liking.  I have played around with the Chaos fracture system in UE5 recently on my Police Chase Simulator game in an upcoming barrier police mechanic that tries to slow you down during chase and player can break through them.  The trouble with the fracture system is it is a UGeometryCollectionComponent and UCharacter base classes that use character movement must have a skeletal mesh.  To be able to break the main character which is the main innovation of the game (at least for me) I must flip between that component and the skeletal mesh.  Currently this is the source of most of the bugs in the game as I haven't worked out this transition completely yet.  

Get Krumbles the Cookie

Leave a comment

Log in with itch.io to leave a comment.