Hi, hello, welcome back!  Day 5 is already here and I can see the finish line approaching fast.  Today felt a lot like mostly polish work, even though some of it was the additional game mechanics I talked about a few days ago.  Let's dig in...

First let's talk about the mechanics, which are becoming a bit more systemic feeling.  Systemic games are basically games made up of basic systems that interact with each other to produce new results.  Mark Brown (Game Makers Toolkit) has an excellent video on YouTube, look it up after this post.  But now, systems like water, bombs, and stones interact with each other a little more.  Bombs can be pushed by a player, which requires one move per tile.  Or, can be moved a long distance by shooting them with a water gun and letting them slide as far as they can go.  Dirt tiles now interact with water to grow back their grassy tops that can be lit on fire, making using water on dirt a risk, unless you want to build grass to control the direction the fire grows.  Every system in the game has multiple purposes and many different uses to solve each puzzle.

A little bit of basic polish was added to make the game feel a little more... like a full game.  The player now actually moves between tiles, a feature that may be added to the water, bomb, and fire eventually.  Additionally, the 'water shoot' mechanic controls were changed and new indicators were added to signal that the player is lining up a water shot and essentially requires a confirmation button press before activating.

A few new bugs popped up during these new implementations but I've solved just about everything that I've seen; a few bug fixes happened in the last day but nothing worth noting here.

I really like the core mechanics behind this game; I'm a little burnt out but I'm pretty tempted to take it after the jam and clean it up for a full release.  Game development is tough, and even though she's caught a bad cold, my girlfriend Danni really believes in me and I love her for it.

Next up: More art, more levels, and fixing any more bugs that come up.  One thing that's definitely needed: A restart level button.