I eventually started 16 hours after the the jam had started as I was alseep when it began and had to do something for most of the next day.

The plan was to do it in 3D but with all the time I lost, I panicked and opted for 2D instead. And oh boy was that a bad decision at the time. it took me the best part of 5 hours to figure out where I was going wrong with Hinge Joints, all kinds of wacky things were happening and the limbs weren’t even connected most of the time, and we getting skewed in really weird ways, as in the picture

So where was I messing up so badly then?

At first I thought it was the fact I was using custom pivots, so I adjusted each sprite’s pivot point multiple times to no avail, the limbs weren’t even connecting

Then I thought it was the anchor points I was picking themselves. I had to fiddle with every single limb’s anchors while running the game to “fix” it, but as soon as I ran the game again they would b miles off untill they fell into their resting positions.

It was neither of those. It was the heirarchy that was causing all the problems. I foolishly parented all the body parts to each other (like hand child of forearm, forearm child of upper arm etc). By chance I unparented everything at one stage and it suddenly all (almost) worked! So a few minutes later and everything was golden.

That’s where I left it last night, character done and flopping around the place

• Today

Today was all about the environment and scenery. I hadn’t done any proper background decorbesides the clouds and snow particles on day 1. I started the day off with the tree, a simple enough model which only took 35 minutes to finish entirely. Next was the pond and land. The pond itself was made from a curve that was filled in, the landscape was sculpted up to cover the edges of the pond. Lastly in terms of art there was the snowball and the shattered snowball particle. Besides that the rest of the day was spent on either code, music or procrastinating (watching youtube videos, spending time writing out a very long news article for the game, etc). I can’t really show off code here, but here’s some of the simple music I made (This is the background track):

https://soundcloud.com/pelagic-reactor/ski-dont-background-music

Here’s how it’s looking after today’s work

• Tonight and Tomorrow

Mostly coding to be done now, things like gamestates, obstacle generation, and GJ API integration. There may be a few more songs or small bits of art to do, but the majority of the time will be spent typing from here on out

When the game eventually does get finished, the aim will be to keep the skier’s torso and arms from hitting the ground for as long as you can, while snowballs are thrown at you and runaway snowballs try and knock you off your feet.

If you really want to, you test the control mechanics out for yourself as a primitive version of the game is uploaded.

Cheers for reading.