Greetings , Welcome to my Devlog!

I already have a little experience in game development in Unity, but this is my first game jam so I hope that the time pressure will help me with actually completing a game :). So far I worked mostly on the gameplay programming and AI part of games, in this jam I would like to concentrate more on art and visuals.

Concept

I try to keep it simple this time  - the basic game idea is to make a tower defense game combined with some action elements if the tower defending and base management gets too boring. There will be buildings to place, ressources and moving enemies and allied troops.  And a character you can control. So an strategy/action mix. The artstyle will be minimalistic - just some basic shapes, but with nice particle effects and shaders. That is what i want to learn - how to make things look good in Unity, how to use their new shadergraph, lighting  and particle effects and how to design the visual part of a game. 

 Lets see how far I get ..

Plot

Cyberknights and big explosions a lá Michael Bay , so far...

Devlog #1

So I was sitting there yesterday, eating grandma's pierogi and decided that i need a plan for an MVP. A fun game to play which i can make in maximum 7 days, so i can spend the rest  of the time on the visuals and artistic side of the game. I have to keep it even simpler.  The Idea i came up with was:

• We see the game through an isometric topdown view like in old strategy or rpg games.
• The player can move the camera around and place buildings if he has enough ressources and if other prerequisites are met.
•  Buildings need to be constructed by workers,, i dont know where they will come from so far, probably the will come out of the base.
• There is a base, which you need to defend from enemies, if it gets destroyed, the game is over
• There are buildings which are responsible for the defense of your base, like towers
• There are harvester buildings - buildings which give you certain ressources over time  (they have small workers venturing out to gather the ressources)
• And of course there are enemies which try to destroy your base
• to sum up i stick with strategy only for my MVP. If everything goes well and theres still time left, I will ad the action element in form of a character which you can control in 3rd person mode - to take part in the fighting on the battlefield
  

Progress so far

On day one the foundations for the building system were laid. I decided to make a building placement that gives the player more freedom than most tower defense games. The building placement system is grid based. It checks if there are no collisions with other objects in the game world and places buildings. There are no construction workers yet, so the buildings in the gif get constructed by a pressing a key:

Today, on day two, ressources were added. Now we need ressources to build buildings. IN this gif one cylinder costs 10 orange thingis

Now it gets more difficult because i do not know how to design the different building types in code. I will try to lean more about scriptable objects in Unity, because they seem to be good for this purpose.

Sorry for the poor gif quality, i will correct them if i get the hang out of ScreenToGif and compression

Devlog #2

Progress was made, i thought about how the game will work and decided to have an economy similar to one of my favorite games - Spellforce3.  The economy in Spellforce 3 is based upon assigning workforce to specific buildings.

We need workforce? So here I proudly present the industrious workers:

What do these workers do? In the beginning there was mayhem:

But soon they've learned the way of things - the workers get spawned by the central building - the "base-building" and if they have no work, thy will just run around  minding theyre own buisness like in the image above. So far they can be assigned to work in a harvester building and collect ressources or they can  workin the "base-building" as construction wokrers. There they will wait until there are buildings to construct and go and construct them.

Heres a video how this economy works:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/gz0l5ixmo8qiwif/video%204%20economy%20no%20sound_x264....

In the beginning we assign some workers to the 2 harvester buildings, and the workes start collecting the ressources below. Than we assign some workers to work as construction workers at the base, they build a house which raises the population limit and allows more workers to spawn.

So the economy is working,  we can build and collect as much as we want. Thats to nice to be true, ... and quite boring. We need some enemies  which try to disturb our peace, something to give purpose to the defense tower.

As you see the red guy is pretty frightening already, but it gets even worse if they learn to move ... in the next Devlog :)

For anyone interested, the workers move with the unity navigation system, Brackeys has a nice tutorial for it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHV1ymlw-P8

wow this is awesome progress so far! i love the little characters so much haha. it's great that you also included the navigation system resource!