Progress!

Finally, I made some progress on my game (I'm going solo again). After starting with some ideas that were pen and paper tested I decided to scale it right back. The design I came up with was more suited to a 3-4 player game and was too large in scope for a game jam. I whittled it down to its essence and shunned a dimension.

The aim of the game

Each player takes turns in pushing a rain cloud back and forwards with a measured gust of wind. Put out your opponent's campfire before they do yours to win. Every millisecond the cloud hangs over your campfire it'll lose health so the pressure is on to get that cloud off your campfire and onto the other without wasting your turn! 

What's next?

My next task is to try and animate that cloud between points instead of it snapping to its end location. I gave up on that tonight and implemented some UI instead (which went better than expected). I also need to give the campfire health and a health bar. I'd love to animate the fire to represent the health it has but I don't think I'm going to get time to do that. I need to close the core loop first.

Fun stuff

Here are some sketches (minus a bunch of brainstorming I made in Pages, which I could provide if there's interest), along with the first gameplay GIF. (Anyone know how to resize images in the editor here?)

Well, well. 

I am rather chuffed with myself tonight. I set out to make the cloud animate between start and end points and whattayknow, I did it! I really didn't expect to get this done so easily and I even got bonus points for rigging it up with an animation curve and having the time vary depending on the distance. 

All small things to experienced programmers because it really is simple math (distance / speed = time) but putting the whole thing together in only 2 hours made me feel godlike. On a personal level, it was a huge confidence boost to be able to objectively see that I'm getter better at programming.

Any ideas?

I tried to add some anticipation frames (bottom image) at the start and some overshoot at the end but the animation curve clamps values to positive to the same effect as the default ease in-out curve (top image). I might still be able to get the effect I want but if it's not easy I'm going to move on as it's a nice-to-have. If anyone can shed some light on this I'd be super grateful!

Next Step

Rig up the player health so there's a complete game loop. 

Polish (like shine, not people from Poland)

Didn't do much tonight, trying to take it easy because I'm recovering from being sick and can feel myself getting rundown again.

What I did get done though was again impressive for myself. I've added a little anticipation and follow through to the animation. I had to rewrite the code a little and whilst it runs there's strange behaviour in that the anticipation works, but the follow through doesn't. I have no idea...I might post it to Discord tomorrow to see if anyone knows about animation curves. I've not used them before but they're super cool to spruce up a boring lerp.

What an awesome community!

Not much to show today but I did get some help from Daftao, an amazing member in the My First Game Jam community. It was nailing the problem I had yesterday in getting the last part of the curve to render. I can't begin to thank him enough for taking the time to look at my code and figure it out. Such a minor change, I never would've figured it out myself.

The result is a cloud that has a little bit more character. I could continue to tweak the curve as it still feels a little mechanical but I don't have to touch code to do that. This is about as far as I'll push the animation during the jam. I could spend forever making it bop up and down as it chugs between points but I'll end up failing to close to core game loop.

Thanks again, Daftao!

Didn't get up to much yesterday as I'm trying to look after myself, getting over some nasty viral thing.  I did a little bit of setting up for the player damage system, which will round off the game loop. I'm confident that's all stuff I've done before and shouldn't be too difficult. We'll find out tonight.

What's left to do?

1. Rain deals damage to campfires
2. Game Over screen
3. Start screen
4. Design logo
5. Game icon/thumbnail for itch.io page
6. Generate builds (I really hope to do a WebGL one this time) and upload - WebGL is still failing...FML
7. (optional) Animate fire
8. (optional) Replace placeholder art

On a roll

Had a super productive night (and lunch break). 

I wrote some spaghetti code for the player health that half worked but was super confusing to get the last bit done, so I scrapped it all and rewrote it into 1/5th of the line count. So fresh and so clean (and it works 100% like I wanted it to).

The game state is now implemented, including a game over screen and reloading the game to play again.

A minor detail was making the drop sizes a bit more organic by varying their size.

I really wanted to have a build posted to the half way play testing thread but Unity did its usual thing of blowing out build sizes and flat out failing my WebGL builds so I'm going to miss out on that. Does anyone know why WebGL builds have failed every single project for me? Super frustrating.

What's left?

Besides the things in the last post, there are a couple of things that need fixing when it comes to gameplay:

1. Disabling player input when cloud is moving (should be trivial)
2. stop cloud moving off edge of screen (not sure I'll tackle this one)

I think screen wrapping the cloud might also be fun for penalising overshoots but that's not going to happen in time for this game jam.

Early night for me tonight, need some sleep. A quick(ish) win today avoided a Zero Day.: disabling player input when cloud is moving.  

I also noticed in one of the above GIFs that the odd rain drop disappears. That might be to do with particle triggers and colliders that I was playing with but didn't get to work. Hopefully if I turn those off it'll fix that issue. 

Short but sweet

Finished up early again tonight, but had a productive night. Probably because I didn't play any games...

• Icon designed
• Added sky gradient
• Added burnt out fire graphic when fire is extinguished
• Added drop shadow to cloud and rain drops
• Fixed Alpha Cutoff on rain drop material (smoother edges now)
• Middle raindrop stream now does 33% more damage than outer two streams
• Increased rain drop particle spawn rate
• Added more random values to rain drop particles to feel more organic
• Decreased stream hitbox width to feel more fair
• Decreased fire hurtbox width to feel more fair

What's Next?

I might spend any extra time I've got on art and stay away from the code. It's all a bit dark and flat at the moment so hopefully I can give it a bit of dimension.

Unplanned improvements feel awesome!

I didn't plan on doing much to the game as we're so close to the end. I didn't want to stuff something up or get caught mid way through something. However, I got on a role and had some great progress. The only down side to this is I'm up late again and I'm going to pay for that tomorrow. 

New art direction

I didn't think I'd get time to update the art but I'm glad I did. It was very dull and boring with the placeholder assets. I was worried I'd struggle making it dark and gloomy while still appearing lighthearted but I think I've done ok capturing that in the new cloud.  Let me know your thoughts on progress with the new art direction! (Here's a GIF with crazy banding)

Big UX win for player turns

Another change I got to make and wasn't expecting was related to how players build up their next shot. I knew how I wanted it to play but after a brief playtest today with a workmate (thanks, Rob) he said exactly what I wanted to do, without being prompted. That inspired me to have a look at it in spite of not wanting to touch the code from here on. 

I figured it out (quite easily, which was odd) and in the process removed around 20 lines of code. <feelsgoodman.jpg>

Tonight's progress

• Complete colour palette overhaul
• Added shadow to cloud
• Updated art assets
• Added ability to hold button to power up next move whilst previous move is still in motion (big UX win)
• Added 3 visual stages to fire assets
• Player settings configured, ready for build (icon will need revisit with updated visuals)