What's up! This is the first devlog post for my entry for Bigmode's 2023 gamejam(jam link). I thought it would be cool to have a running devlog series for the game I am creating for me to look back on. Hopefully, others may find this interesting as well. The jam started a while back but I was struggling with getting good game ideas for the jam's theme: mode.  I had a few different ideas of what "mode" could mean for a game. However, none of those ideas were anything that made my imagination run to fill out game mechanics for them. The jam is set to run for 3 weeks, I believe, and I took the first week to find an idea that kept my imagination.

This idea was a bear rpg-type game where the player controls a bear as it navigates its seasonal activities. The seasons, in this case, would be the bear's "mode".  I started out the game-mechanic planning phase of the project earlier this week. Had to do some bear activities research to base the game-mechanics around. The following was what I wrote down as a brain dump of what the season's playstyle would look like for a player.

I opted for the game's control to be purely mouse-driven. I loved how a dense rpg like this year's Baulder's Gate 3 was able to be completely mouse-driven. I believe that games are best with as few controls as possible. I felt that for a mouse-controlled rpg-type game that I needed to create in two weeks, the control system in RimWorld would be best due to its simplicity. Most of that  game's logic functions in a grid, which I believe makes the development of pathfinding easy. I tried to avoid using Godot's native path-finding offerings because I did not want to learn anything that seemed too complicated with what I had left for the jam. Who knows, this might be a mistake down the line. My initial planning process took about 6 hours across two days and it involved game-mechanic planning and game component(how mechanics would be implemented) designing. The following is my rough concept drawing, from my planning notes, of what I initially planned for the game to look like. 

I historically made games using Unity. However due to events in the company that happened earlier this year(idk look it up), I thought it might be best for a mostly solo dev like myself to try a more simple, lightweight game engine like Godot. I had experimented with the engine in the past, but I have not made anything substantial with it before. Thus, the development of my preliminary plans went slower than it would in Unity. I came in with a basic understanding of Godot's handling of nodes and UI building, but I had to spend a good chunk of time getting up to speed on the tile mapping system that Godot offered. After understanding how it works, I enjoyed working with Godot's native implementation of tile maps more than what Unity offered with its 2D tile map package.  I usually like to ensure the game components are developed before working on the art. To get the dev process started,  I created some REALLY basic sprites in Aesprite to use as placeholders. 

Below is a quick and dirty manual buildout of what I would want the UI to look like. 

Here is a screenshot of the current state of the actual game. The test scene below is of a rabbit chillin' by some rocks and trees(imagination might be needed). 

The dev and learning process to produce the rabbit scene above took about 6 hours across two days again. The UI scene above that took another hour for me to lay out. As of now, the rabbit can travel in a pre-set sequence of points on the map. The next step is to connect the two scenes functionally, ui and the main one, to have the rabbit be able to be dynamically controlled by the player. 

This devlog did take longer than expected to write(I'm a horrible judge of time). Who knows when the next one will be. *wave* Anyways, until the next one. 

- Wilbur