Been doing a bunch of coding from day 1 throughout the early morning of day 3.

After thinking of ideas before the jam, I eventually settled on an arcade-y claw machine game. In this game, you're some kind of washed-up engineer that built a boat with a Special Crane(TM) and you've been tasked to collect invasive species of fish from different places for relocation. The game will play like a 2D claw machine... except your targets move around and can get mad at you and attack your machine. Plus the water can be pretty rough out there, sometimes stuff will just bump into your crane and reduce the time your machine works.

For the past 3 days, I've only been focusing on the programming and design side of things.  Mostly programming. I've been coding whenever I'm bored.

• Day 1
  • Created a sheet to keep track of all possible tasks for the game
  • Created the base level scene and the crane mechanics and movement
• Day 2
  • I created the base fish game object and the script that controls their behavior. On this day, the only behavior they have was moving side to side. I listed down ideas for other behaviors:
  • Erratic: the fish selects a random point in the water, goes there, and takes a few seconds to think about the next place they're gonna go.
  • Floating: the fish selects a point in the water nearby and doesn't think about where they're going to go. They select a point, go there, and immediately select another point.
  • Basic, Changing: the fish moves side to side for a few 'cycles', after which they'll choose a random point in the water and go there, and then move side to side again. It's a mix of basic movement and erratic movement.
  • Your crane can now catch fish.
  • I decided to make it so that all fish data and level data can be created in a sheet. If I have the time, I'll make a script that just generates FishData and LevelData from my design sheets.
  • With that said, I made a LevelBuilder script that holds the data for a level. I've realized that the level variety will depend on the different fish found in the level plus the amount of debris that can damage your crane. I figured, instead of manually placing fish into a scene, I'd create a level builder that just does all of it for me based on the data I give them
  • The LevelBuilder can generate debris depending on the intensity I set. The higher the number = the more frequent debris will appear
  • I made a timer for the level. Coins will increase the time remaining, so you can get more fish. The coin functionality didn't exist yet.
• Day 3
  • The bulk of my Day 3 progress was done in the middle of the night... from 12 AM to 9 AM. I just got really sidetracked and may or may not have forgotten my meds.
  • The game now has aggressive fish that chase your crane when they see it within their search radius, and damage your crane when they collide with you while they're mad at you.
  • Created the inventory UI.
  • Using coins now increases the time remaining.
  • Created the "pheromone" item functionality alongside the aggressive fish. Using this item will disable the search radius of all aggressive fish in the water... for a short while.
  • Finished coding all the movement types. Basic, Changing movement is the one I struggled with the most lol

There's still a lot to do. Everything I've done is done in the main game scene, but I plan to move some game objects to a different scene--I pretty much wrote down the scene load order yesterday. It shouldn't be too hard, since I've already taken into account which ones should persist between scenes.

In terms of scenes, I still have to make the level select, game over/level-end scene, and shop--but I'll do that once I coded the scene handling and stuff.

For the actual gameplay, there's not much left to do. I need to make a script for using fish Bait, and code the fish's behavior when it gets used. Then I have to make the level end screen that evaluates how you did (basically how much invasive fish you got out of the total fish) plus the amount of money you earn. The UI part is the worst, I'm not looking forward to that. After that, I'm going onto designing the fish. Deciding their behaviors, the bait they use, whether they will be aggressive... and then designing the levels.

With all this being said, I'm actually not sure if this game will actually be fun. I'm just glad that I'm making stuff. For so long I've told myself to join a jam and I never actually go for it because I'm afraid that I'm not good enough at all aspects of development and that I'm not going to meet the deadline. But to be honest? It doesn't matter. I have so many game ideas that are way too complicated for my skill level, and I think I need a game jam to make my aspirations a little more realistic at first. I've started 2 of my dream games already and I haven't gotten past the 'prototype' stage for the first one, and the 'planning' stage for the second because the projects are too big for what I can achieve at the moment. It takes a lot more writing, a lot more complicated coding, a lot more development experience. If I don't force myself to make a simpler game, I'm afraid I never will be able to make a game by myself.

That's it. Good luck to me. I had to force myself to make this dev log. I've been trying to write this since last night and I keep getting distracted by coding the actual game.

^-^