BackVlog :D

I just wanted to say big thank you to you all. 

It was my first game jam and it was a killer. I worked into late nights but I really wanted to finish at least the general idea. And being me, over-scoped, I didn't bother with reducing the amount of features cause there will be time for that later. I made a main character (Blender) and imported it into game engine, reassigned materials, made a walk animation, ensured footstep sound match with the animations and then realized it'd be better to go with 1st person view...
...and after adding camera and character controller, I could see inside the character and so maybe I will make the character invisible or at least the top half of  it or or or or or...
...and then I disabled the character model with its animation and instead I made an invisible capsule  with simple footsteps sounds. Yup - that was a good 2 day start. But I had an idea and wasn't about to give up on it just yet. 
The  jam rules were to use as little of third party assets as possible so after coding my own character controller I went ahead and started making my environment. The theme was "knowledge", and the jam is known for horrors so the first (cliché)  idea of summoning daemon to gain knowledge was out. Instead I went for a single location with lots to do - library.  
I thought, think small, think small, you have less than a week, damn it!.

I started making library model and shelves and then I made a book to put it on shelf. And then I copied the book, and I copied it again and again and again...

...and when the shelf was full, I had 125 copies of the same model and it looked great, and uniform, and boring, and it did want me to turn my pc off and scream into pillow but then...

...(not that the fact being 3AM matters) voice in my head sounded : "you made it, it's your game, you fix it or leave it - it's your making you tired bastard!". 

And I moved to coding. I thought, 125 books × 5 shelves per aisle × 3 aisles × 3 sections → that's only 5,625 books I need to make 🥹. 
Great, since it's supposed to run in browser, I made the building, shelves and book model static and ensured it's made of single material and shape so only one GPU draw will be called for single object. Then I went ahead and wrote down (for next few days when on train or literally on the toilet) over 800 "scientific" titles I could think of. Then I made the book into 7 different colours and I got 12 different fonts. 
Now I was ready, simple (or so I thought) script and and I had my 4500+ books (I removed few per shelf so they won't look like made by a 12 year old). 

Anyway, thanks to that every time you start the game, each book gets it's own title, colour and font →  (864 × 7 × 12 = 72 576 combinations) so there is little possibility you might have 2 same books in my library. In addition, since I had the code already, I just added few more lines and so when you press the start button, 12 books you are tasked to find, are going to replace random ones from those 4500+ so no 2 players will have it the same 🎮 Don't worry though, I made it so no more than 2 books can be found in single aisle so you can stop hitting that "Start New Shift" button hoping to get all of them in same place. 

All in all, I hope you enjoy it. As a single dev, I can say, I was challenged beyond of what I expected and definitely more than I'm capable of. I learnt a lot about scoping my work. I discovered even more about how far I can push myself and can definitely say I will never do this again. Planning ahead is crucial and even more important is sticking to such plan so you won't become the very thing you try to illustrate in a game.

Hope you guys are all good and please have fun playing!
As always, constructive criticism is most welcome.