Hey all, I'm going to throw the intro questions in here reaaal quick before I jump into the overview of my game!

1. Hi there! What's your name? Want to introduce yourself?

• I'm Cynthia & I'm at the moment primarily a hobbyist illustrator, but can be flexible with a basic to average knowledge of animation and 3D modelling.

• I did participate last time but I got suuuper wound up in doing literally One Thing that I didn't even get to implement any of it in anywhere! But I've learned from that and I've even prepped early this time by reading up a bit of C# a couple days before the jam started. Previously, I didn't know a single line of code! I return to bring my newfound C# knowledge to the test and to make something I can be proud of.

• I typically like point-and-click games, stuff like Putt-Putt/Pajama Sam, Grim Fandango and Ghost Trick are really strong examples but I enjoy Ace Attorney for the super simple investigation modes as well. Those games are what I look up to the most when it comes to potential game ideas for their narratives, but I like Pokemon, Splatoon, Mario and Kirby games (of course). 

4. Do you have experience with game development? What did you do/with what engine?

• I don't have any experience but I am pretty interested in messing around in Unity!

5. Tell us about something you're passionate about!

• I like to have a good time. I also like murder mysteries??? (These interests are not correlated.)

6. What are your goals for this game jam?

• My goal is definitely to make some sort of build regardless how small, haha. I've scoped out what I can do within my capabilities and, while C# and being poor at time management were the biggest obstacles last time, I'm making an effort to do more. I'm not pushing myself too hard though, and have been taking breaks with Splatoon 2 since it came out- how can I not?!

7. Any advice to new jammers (if you're a veteran)?

• Do things within your abilities. Cut out extraneous stuff that you're not sure you can handle and make something with the stuff you know and the good good resources provided by the jam hosts! This is basically me telling myself not to do flub and do what I did last time, haha.

Thanks for reading this rather wordy introduction! And now, onward to the stuff I'm going to be working on for the next two weeks!

July 23rd, day 1

Alrighty, so the game I'm looking to make is just as the title says- it's a game about being in your room and packing your bag. The character (you! the player! HOPEFULLY-) is nervous about going on a trip and is kind of stalling around in her room, looking at stuff that she's had in there forever- posters, collectibles, stationary- regular room stuff. In the meanwhile, she also keeps getting messages on her phone which are blissfully distracting her from packing.

The goal is by no means to pack everything she needs because she doesn't even know what she needs! There's no checklist or anything (because she didn't care to write one) and she's pretty aimlessly looking at stuff in her room, hoping for inspiration or divine intervention to strike.

So far, this is what I've got done in regards to the jam itself; a nice page of notes.

Utter chicken scratch complete with Pikachu trading card bookmark. The pathetic thing is, I actually had to google a list of things to pack and later decided I didn't want a checklist in the game. Sigh.

Pretty barebones but I'm trying to keep in mind what my capabilities are and if I can execute them into a game. It's a simple concept with not much to it, but I guess that's just how I like it.

My time yesterday and today has mostly been spent finishing a course on learning C# since that was my Big Thing In The Way. And now that it's (sort of) not, I can move on a little!

.........

... Almost. It's okay. I'll find a fix... eventually.

I've also fussed around in Unity with a weird scene only for testing sake.

It's nothing at the moment but I'm planning to model the room that will be our setting for the heroine.

And that's my Sunday! I'm hoping to work around that goofy raycast problem quickly so I can get on with my life and the game about being in your room and packing your bag! (Good grief, I've got to come up with a better name...)

Thanks for reading!

July 24th, day 2

Today I had two things I wanted to figure out, a raycast and to show the mouse cursor. I got one done along with making my test setting!

The raycast turns green as soon as it its an object within the distance. I wanted objects to be within the persons reach. Would have been better to make the table a smidge taller though,...

Some placeholder Spiritual Stones spheres while I test the raycast and printing dialogue.

Unfortunately I couldn't quite figure where to attach the cursor script, so I might just save that for another day when I have more time. I didn't have enough to be the most productive today (nor will I tomorrow), but I'm quite satisfied with getting some really basic things down! The First Person Control is of course supplied by Unity's assets, cutting out the frustration for me.

Next I'm planning to figure out the raycast in regards to highlighting/interacting with objects.

Thanks for tuning in!

July 29th, day ...3 I guess?

HEY GUYS- sorry for being completely dead silent on this- work is to blame for wringing out my energy these past few Business Days™.

I'm still struggling with coding things in Unity but not as much, thanks to a friend putting up with my questions and thanks to my sitting in the Unity Documentation and reading extensively on how the stuff operates hand in hand with C#, haha. I'm still very very very much a baby at coding. It doesn't really help that I read everything on my breaks and forget everything as soon as I get home though.
Regarding my raycast problem, I've all but figured it out at the moment! It seems yet another obstacle I've hit is trying to detect certain objects to be inspected and that's a whole nother script I'm not too confident in doing. 

For me, the difficulty in all this has definitely been conceived by my trying to code barely operating things. Too frustrated for words the other day, I've cast the code to the side and decided to make my room assets.

Not much to show still, but it's worth sharing..! I thoroughly enjoy modelling- even though it's been a reaaaaal long time since I have, I'm not too rusty. I also threw in a probably-not-placeholder placeholder skybox just for fun.

A desk lightly modeled after my own and those orbs still hanging around for... sentimental reasons? And I'm not quite sure why the computer monitor screen is like, see through- I'm certain it should be solid like so:

??? Weird hole in the middle of the screen, I don't need your trouble right now okay.

Tomorrow I'm planning to quash my script dilemma once and for all before I get swept away at work again! Afterwards it might be a model grind until the end. I'm not too worried on the 'writing' aspect of my game- it's a lot of small internal dialogue. It would be cool if I could include timed events but that might be for when I'm a little more skilled in coding... (sobs).

Thanks for reading!!!

July 30th, day 4

CODE, COMPLETE. I sat down in a screen share call with a programmer friend  for almost three hours, trying to quash all the C# nonsense I messily put together via my YouTube tutorial binges. He taught me some good good stuff and without his help, I wouldn't have the interface I wanted which is simple but dang do I enjoy it a lot!? 

My goal for the game was to create this sort of visual where you walk around the room and ponder your belongings and this pretty much nails it for the game jam. I have a raycast set to detect game objects within a certain distance and on a certain layer; upon approach, the items will be highlighted and give a little blurb about the object my fading text in and out, like so--

I am extremely pleased and grateful for my friend helping me!!

Threw in a glimpse of the computer with an illustration of Goldeen from my Pokemon Daily twitter. Which, admittedly I haven't been keeping to daily since I'm working on this game. Oh my.

Now that the super tough part of this journey is out of the way, I can FINALLY get around to some visual stuff!! I am more of a visual person, being a general artist and all so I can't freakin wait to make stuff to fill the room holy cow. Being so hung up on code was my biggest concern and now that the obstacle has been BLASTED AWAY, I can enjoy the rest of creating the game tbh.

I've laid out the room to be explored and hope to get all these miscellaneous items stuffed into the room!

Yeah, I wrote the date in the upper left as the 31st because well, it's 1am right now. Woops.

While it is a game about packing your bag, there really isn't any packing involved actually. I know, I know, misleading, but I hope to come up with a title some time in the coming week because lord is the current one a mouthful.

Thanks for tuning in!

August 2nd

Quick update- I spent the day modelling and I'm super happy with the results!

The blender render view of the goodies and the open closet I have stuffed in the corner. The smaller items are in a separate blender file so I don't lose em haha.

I was so happy that I kind of eagerly threw some things in Unity to fool around. Going straight to the messing around, I tossed a placeholder indication color on things I have yet to properly add a UV/material color to. Here's a "secret" that I squeezed in (because I wanted to see if the raycast distance would reach the ceiling, and, well-)

I love it.

Also, a minor speed bump- I couldn't figure out why my UV was inverted on my cylinder mesh so I have this melon soda wrapper on hold until I can fix that because man do I really want this  completely unnecessary visual in my game.

- - - - - - - - - - - - 

While I couldn't implement any sort of text message pop-up systems to interrupt our protags thoughts, I'm rather proud of what I currently have especially given the fact that I've worked more at my day job than I have worked on my game (cries). I'm not too upset though, considering it did seem a little out of my code capabilities.

This will likely be the last devlog update since I have work these next couple days so I want to be spending my limited time on a model grind up until the end of the jam. 

Thanks for sticking around and I hope you look forward to my game that I still haven't thought of a title for!!! Geez!!!!

This is coming along great!

I think your perseverance is paying off!

i like it

Ahh mann this looks great! Everything is so cute! I love it :)

This looks so cool! Great work!

[Post-mortem] Room for thought

Game can be found here! https://mythridate.itch.io/room-for-thought

✦

I want to say right off the bat, I'm very pleased with the result of the game- even though I've been staring at it for days straight for the past week, I was still completely taken aback at the fact that I actually made something! As soon as I hit build and play, my eyes shot open and I ran around the room as if it were my first time playing it. I can't express how happy I am with the result of the game, despite it being just a few minutes long. My friend put it well, describing it as "a pleasant little bite of time".

Something you'll notice right off the bat is the fact that you kind of have to stretch your imagination when it comes to the objects in question. Sure, the paper is shaped like a paper and the books are in a bookshelf, but alone they're just a bunch of weird shapes and planes. Ideally, I wanted the visuals to look similar to those of the Katamari games.

Image from Katamari Items.

They have this odd, low poly, low res texture charm to it (which I love), but unfortunately I couldn't optimize a way to create many differentiating textures for the items since I had trouble with unwrapping the UVs and essentially getting lost in all the faces. I did attempt it on two clothing articles though, shown below.

Although it didn't quite pan out, there's not much lost from the lack of shirt textures.

✦

The title Room for thought came to me as literally as you would expect it- you're in a room, thinking about all this stuff. I speculated lightly on a meaning behind it but the simplicity describes as much as I would need it to.

✦

As for the game itself in regards to my initial goal, I believe I got as close as I could within the limit! It's true that I noted I wanted our character to be looking at all sorts of nonsense in her room, one of the things being collectibles. There is a disturbing lack of collectibles (as well as personal items in general) and while it is truthfully because I physically could not model fast enough to get everything I wanted in there, it oddly falls into the setting of the game quite well. Persi pondering the things in her room that is barren of all things that could describe the person is somewhat a reflection of myself- in that I tend to have a hidden feeling that things I make aren't infused with my personality enough. It was here that I added the fact that Persi and her partner Dorianne recently moved in. The cardboard boxes, the lack of things filling the room, the bare, poster-less walls, the overall cleanliness of it all indicates this fact and contributes to the wandering around.

This gap between just moving in and her already packing for a different, unnamed trip shortly afterwards gives off a strange out of place feeling. Visually, (in terms of the models and colors) I believe the game looks comfortable, but spacial-y it's disconcerting.

✦

Honestly, this game isn't up to snuff regarding my original idea, but it's an amazing starting point. I learned a lot from wrestling with C# to figuring out what blurbs to write. While I wanted this to be a full-fledged narrative driven point-and-click, the narrative was lost due to the fact that I couldn't implement an event where Dorianne would text Persi (in the form of some sort of pop-up UI) from time to time. It was this combined with the lack of models that I had to wriggle out some sort of explanation for the lack of, well, everything in-game.

Despite what I originally intended not making it into the game, I'm still completely satisfied with the outcome of the game! I would love to expand on this idea since I'm very attached to it, so Room for thought is just a prototype of hopefully more to come, and I have My First Game Jam to thank for throwing me in a time limit to do the thing I've been putting off forever.

My completely obvious nod to My First Game Jam.