Game Posted

Preface

This isn't so much devlog as it is a post-mortem, since I'm writing it after the fact. Being my second game ever, I came in knowing I would not have the skills to accomplish everything I wanted. One of those things I didn't quite get to was the daily devlog. Once I began working on the game, I was quickly overwhelmed with the amount of work involved. Taking time out to log my progress seemed impossible.

In hindsight, I see how it would have been beneficial for my own time management to reflect on what I accomplished and what was left to do each day. The approach I ended up taking was a mix of "what should I do next?," "how do I do that?," and "how did I break that?."     

8/14 - Start of the Game Jam
Feeling sick for the last couple of days, I basically glanced at the assets when they were announced and felt uninspired. I then did not think about anything for the next three days as I felt sick and miserable.

8/18 - Brain Storm and Research
Still not at 100%, I eased into the jam by brainstorming some ideas. Unsure of my skills, I decided to go with a brick breaking game with some hopefully unique mechanics. Unfortunately, the art assets just didn't inspire me. I decided to focus on skill building rather than spend more time looking for that killer interpretation of the art.

8/19 - Work Begins
After learning about scriptable objects in Unity, I felt inspired to incorporate them into my game. I followed some tutorials to build an SO audio system. This felt like a great start since my last game(which was also my first game jam) did not have any sound at all due to running out of time.

I also got the basic block breaking mechanics in, and got the idea for the inventory system where items could be swapped in and out of play on the fly. I feel this did make it into the game in a satisfying way, but the lack of different items I ended up with hurts it a bit. Of my original list of 10 different items only the Hourglass and the Point Bonus made it in.   

8/20 - Work on Levels/Scenes
Researching Unity's scene manager let me implement the system for switching between levels. After starting with scriptable objects, I reverted back to monobehaviors to avoid spending too much time on structure rather than content. In the future I will be looking into creating reusable scriptable object systems for use in multiple games.

At this point I also committed to adding the pathfinding elements necessary for completing levels. A tutorial led me to the A* Pathfinding Project: https://arongranberg.com/astar/

8/21 - Work Blur
This is the day everything started blurring together, as workload surpassed the amount of time left. I began refining game ui elements and fixing bugs, and play testing a simple level.

8/22 - Work Some More
All my time here was spent getting one complete level done, with all major elements working correctly. I knew once I had one working scene, the others would come quickly. If I had started on other levels prematurely, I would have been wasting time chasing the same bugs on multiple levels.

8/23 - Level Design and Polish
In the morning I started duplicating my one complete level and modifying to build the 8 levels. Again, I limited the number of levels due to time, focusing on tutorials first. I think I was fairly successful, but I did leave a lot of level ideas out.

I spent the last of my time fixing some little annoyances and tweaking some game play settings before compiling and doing the final play testing.