How I brought a game about cats to life in only three hours of development

This was my first time participating in TriJam, and I wanted to see what was possible to accomplish in such a limited time frame. After going over initial design ideas with rnukez and figuring out how that would translate to a Godot scene hierarchy, I started developing using a Pomodoro timer with some extra breaks in between working segments. This was only my second game using Godot, and I definitely made some mistakes, such as where to put the start/end scenes in the scene hierarchy, where to manage shared game state, and how to properly start/restart the game. Here's how my time was spent:

2:17 - 2:41

• Set up initial project at 600x600 and added root 2d node
• Created the following scenes and instanced them in the main scene:
  • Cat
  • Player
  • Computer
  • Control
• Added scripts to the above scenes with boilerplate functions such as process, input, etc and some starting variables and constants
• Added label children to Control that will serve as starting text, screen timer, and ending text
• Added children to the other scenes for sprites and colliders
• Positioned objects relative to the main scene roughly where they will be in the final product

3:43 - 4:08

• Added cat walking movement in physics process
  • Cat gets facing direction randomly in ready function, and physics process associates that direction with a Vector2
  • Added upper and lower bounds for cat movement, and handling for when the cat hits the bounding position

4:17 - 4:42

• Added function for cat to move to an area of the computer at a time interval
• Added cat hit function
• Added function for cat to move to the side of the computer after being hit enough times

Around this time, here's what the game was looking like in debug mode:

4:55 - 5:20

• Added input events
• Added export variables to cat for when they are in an area
• Added signal to detect when cat enters or exits an area
• Added signal for when the player pats the cat that calls the cat’s hit function
• Added handling for percentage bar and timer
• Added a game is_running variable and have children scenes checking that

7:30 - 7:55

• Added assets to game
• Added start screen and button functionality
• Started changing cat animations and playing sounds
• Added assets to player and computer scenes

8:00 - 8:50

• Finished handling animations and added signals to return to idle after animations play
• Added end scene and restart functionality
• Fixed styling for timer and productivity meter
• Adjusted values for cat movement and spawn
• Final play testing, balancing, and bug fixing