Yay! I actually finished something for the jam! I was kind of worried at the beginning of the week that I wouldn't be able to finish something, considering that the last major thing I finished was in August and the previous Games Made Quick I didn't finish the game I was working on.
(Still, I'm not sure the difficulty is as good/balanced as I'd like. And I hope it's clear what the graphics are, e.g. that's cake with frosting at the bottom of the screen.)
This was made for Eevee's Games Made Quick jam, which is twice a year during the Awesome Games Done Quick speedrunning marathon. Usually these have an ironic speedrunning-related theme, like "difficult to speedrun", and even though I don't need to follow the theme for these I often do. This year, the only theme the rules mentioned was the other theme this jam sometimes has, Eevee's birthday, so I went with that. (It's also sort of close to my own birthday.)
(I have used Eevee's birthday as a theme once before, in Totally a platformig game, though it's kind of far in.)
So, what are some birthday-related things I could incorporate into a game?
So, for the first thing, I went with a game about lighting candles. At first I was thinking maybe some sort of puzzley game where you'd light candles and maybe there would be wind that could blow out the match that you'd have to avoid, but I didn't know if I could make good puzzles. For the second thing, my idea was to incorporate some sort of autoscroller, and maybe something about the seasons.
And then at some point, I had the idea to associate eeveelutions with each season, so each season also is inspired in some way by two different eeveelutions:
The first season you come to in each playthrough is random, because what birthday you have is random.
On Eevee's actual birthday, her cat died, but that didn't really change my idea for what to do other than the text below the game. 😿