Original title - UTDGfDT

Funny title, huh? The abbreviation UTDGfDT stands for Untitled Tower-Defense Game for DevTober.

WHAT THE GAME IS?

It's a tower-defense game with approaching hordes of enemies in which you as a Boss must prevent the enemies to brake the Crystal, placed in the middle of the map - what you do by hiring mercenaries that will kill enemies (or die during the battle). The main difference from typical games in this genre is 1) Enemies do not follow a pre-set path, instead they just randomly spawn on different corners of the screen and then try to get to the center of the map to reach the Crystal; 2) Your mercenaries are actual entities and can participate in hand-to-hand combat with enemies since they protect the Crystal not just with their weapons, but with their own bodies.

WHO AM I?

A young, currently 16 years old developer and also a beginner pixel artist who wants to develop his own games. I've been working with app development and a few programming languages for 2 years, then started trying myself in the game industry.

During the Summer of 2020, I've been intensively working on game development and developed 6 games in jam format (i.e. under reasonable time limits), though, in fact, only 2 games of those were submissions for jams. The projects were aimed mainly to obtain practical experience in the software I'm working with.

WHAT TO EXPECT FROM THIS DEVLOG?

I honestly don't know haha. I'm sure you'll see news about the development progress of the project, but other than that I can say nothing 100% true :D.

a fun story

I joined the Devtober 2020 game jam on October 18th, which means that the jam was already like half-way through by this time. However, I really wanted to develop my own project after my short break from game dev - so here I am!

DAY 1, October 18th

I joined the jam, got really excited and all that stuff. After that, I wrote a general Game Design Document in Notion for this project in which I described the game, its objective, main mechanics, etc. I have also created a task table to track the development tasks so I can always remember about the scope of the project and not get lost in overworking on small stuff while high-priority tasks would get moved to the last few days.

Also, I set up the project and created a player that can move. That's all for it

DAY 2, October 19th

Added basic enemy that moves from its position to the Crystal and Archers. The Mercenaries (Archers are one type of them) pick one of the pre-defined positions around the Crystal to guard it and go to their newly chosen post. Written the core system for Archer's enemy detection and shooting them.

DAY 3, October 20th

1) Made the archers shoot while they are on their posts. They choose a random enemy inside their detection area as a target.

2) Made the enemies mortal

3) Started writing the devlog for this game

A small video showing current progress on Day 3!

You can see archers go on their posts, enemies chasing the Crystal, archers shooting and killing enemies, and also me as the player just running around.

DAY 4, OCTOBER 21ST

1) Reworked targeting system. Before any enemy that's in the detection range could become a target and the "targeter" would switch the target only if previous one left the detection area OR died. Now archers calculate if the enemy really needs more arrows to die. What it means is that there won't be situations when 20 archers shoot 1 enemy that is low hp and needs just one hit to finally die; instead, there will be just one archer that will shoot just one arrow. It is very helpful when the defense is getting stressful and the mercenaries should use their shots wisely.

2) Added in-game currency (gold) that will be used to hire more mercenaries and other shopping.

3) Created a foundation for the UI shown on the screen during battles. Currently it only shows gold balance and placeholder enemy wave counter.

4) Added super primitive enemy spawn system.

That's it for now! Tomorrow I'll go deeper in mercenary hiring system, i.e. I'll start working on shops.

DAY 5TH, OCTOBER 22ND

1) Created base for the Tavern structure, where you hire new mercenaries, as well as the base of hiring mercenaries itself. There is a screenshot of the Tavern down below. It has its own collision as well as a detection area that checks if the player is within the interaction range or not. Currently it even supports hiring more Archers! I must admit, it was easier than I though it would be.

2) Started working on UI for the hiring menu. The idea is to make this thing pop up over the Tavern when the player approaches it to hire mercenaries. It's not the final design as it's shown on the screenshot below and I'll surely be working on it to make it look more ~aesthethiccc~ I'd say :D.

3) Worked on implementation of enemies' attacks. The idea is to make them attack you, or your allies, or the Crystal with some animation of it (so they won't deal damage to you just by approaching you). It didn't go super easy because of many game design questions and small bugs that needed time to solve them, but I'm happy with the overall process of how it's going.

Right now I'm working on different mechanics at the same time, what surely isn't very helpful for making one particular thing done quick. However, I intentionally don't want to go deep into some one particular mechanic until there is no general foundation. In my opinion it will help me with not losing scope, and constantly finding what I can improve since everything need to be logically linked and interconnected.

That's it for now! Thanks for reading and have a nice day! ^^

DAY 6TH, OCTOBER 23RD

1) A new title set for the game -  UTDGfDT becomes Defend My CRYSTAL! Yay! Now the game's title doesn't look like I was randomly hitting the keyboard with Caps Lock on - that's quite a progress haha.

2) Created an animation of Allies walking out of the Tavern upon hiring. Also made it so the Ally posts glow when they get occupied (and also when it's guard staying on it dies). No more commentaries needed, here's a gif:

It was a busy day and I didn't progress much. However, I'm happy I've done this small detail with hiring animation - for me, it's just nice and cute! Hopefully tomorrow I'll have more results and they will be more important.

That's it! Thanks for following this devlog - stay tuned and have a nice day!

DAY 7TH OF THE DEVELOPMENT PROCESS DEVLOG IS OUT NOW!

Link to the latest devlog.

I've finally created Save My CRYSTAL!'s game page, and future devlogs will be posted in its devlog section.

Hey there people! A new devlog on Defend My CRYSTAL! has been posted just a few moments ago! Make sure to don't miss latest devlog's news.

Link: https://ivess.itch.io/save-my-crystal/devlog/190907/day-11th-october-28th