Jam Devlog: Day 1 - Conception and Planning

Day 1

The Jam's theme was announced at 11pm on a Friday. I was admittedly tired, but I managed to come up with several concepts that would work with the theme of the jam. There is an additional complexity, however, as the jam requires the exclusive use of released Kenney assets. Luckily for me, my concepts roughly work with the themes and mechanics I had in mind.

One of the most empowering, satisfying moments for me while playing games is the feeling of completely triumphing over a combat encounter. For example, being able to take down an enemy's minion without taking any damage in Hearthstone, or accumulating so much ATK and HP in Zenless Zone Zero's Arpeggio Fault gamemode that you can initiate combat and win without a care. In both examples, the satisfaction comes from the struggle before it—you had to experience being weak to appreciate the value of strength. For this reason, I wanted game mechanics that rewarded the player for enduring an early struggle, rewarding them with great strength later in the game.

I had to balance my own ambitions vs my abilities as a developer, so I had to simplify many elements to make the project viable within a 1-2 day development time. I settled for a simplified RPG: minimal stats and interactions and intuitive gameplay to reduce UI and mechanical requirements. I was heavily inspired by ZZZ's Arpeggio Fault and Eternal Senia's combat mechanics which required no menus or player options. Combat was initiated and resolved simply by approaching an enemy. To get the effort-reward aspect, I took inspiration from classic RPGs like Zelda and Fire Emblem, games with clear level and stat progression where challenges get increasingly difficult over time. I decided to make a simplified grinding game where the players would hunt monsters, learn their weaknesses, upgrade their own offensive and defensive capabilities, and aim to defeat every monster with one hit at least once. I drafted some pseudocode and gameplay flowcharts which seemed simple enough and doable on my lonesome within the time frame, and started to work.

I browsed through the catalogue of assets available and decided to use the Tiny Battle pack as it had multiple monsters and player options, as well as a usable map tileset to make an arena with. I imported the tileset into Unity and drafted a simple map as a proof of concept for the game's final visuals.