This will be my first game jam and (hopefully) my first complete game. 

After looking at a couple other dev logs I realized I had the same idea as a few other people, but hopefully mine has a fun original twist.

My game will be 2D top-down sprite animation style. You player has a healer in a typical MMO group and your objective is to keep your party alive. The fun part is that your party sucks and you constantly have to be running around, scrambling to keep them alive. DPS is in the fire again, tank forgot to switch specs, etc. 

Since I'm awful at art and sound design, I'll be looking at some assets I can use either here or on the Unity asset store. I wanted to do this one solo because I'll be working my normal job a lot for the next two weeks and I didn't want to disappoint a teammate if I couldn't fully commit to this jam.

The plan for today is to complete my Design Doc and plan my dev schedule.  

Tomorrow I'll look for assets, get my player moving and have a playtest area built.

Haha honestly I love playing with this kind of concept for a game, it feels very meta! Excited to see more of this one!

Day 2 of development and I'm still on schedule, which basically means I haven't done much because my first few days are planned to be simple steps. 

I've found all the assets I should need for this game, including pixels, animations, particle effects, and audio. 

My player character is able to move around a room and collide with the walls. A simple thing, but this is my first time really working in 2D with Unity so I had to figure out how colliders on tilemaps worked. Composite Collider 2D, such an easy fix.

Tomorrow's task is going to be a bit more complicated. I'll be making Prefabs for my NPCs and Enemies and scripting them to move at each other and "Attack".

I'm also going to set aside some time to go through the suggested screenshot programs so I can start showing some images.

Day 4, no major issues yet. I'm ahead of schedule, but I know I'll need more time to work on animations than I've given myself. 

My enemy and ally are now able to attack each other and lower healthbars. I've also made it so I can do a heal in melee range on my ally. 

I have to give a huge thank you to the Brackeys YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/c/Brackeys. I've been using his tutorials almost every day for this jam. I found out yesterday that he stopped making video content a couple years ago, which is disappointing. 

Tomorrow's goal is to add a ranged heal ability, as well as creating more prefabs for my allies and enemies. I also hope to make a Boss prefab tomorrow, which realistically will just be a upscaled enemy.

I also downloaded ShareX so I can start uploading gifs of some action. I meant to include the Console so you can see when I'm clicking to heal as well.

Day 5 and I've run into my first major issue. 

Today I got my beam heal working, and that was fine. It took a lot longer than I expected, and it doesn't look as nice as I'd like. I may have to revisit it later when I start working on animations and effects to see if I can make it look better. But it heals over time, which is what I wanted it to essentially do. 

I ran into my problem when I started making more prefabs for allies and enemies. As I placed them in the scene to test if their scripts were working it seemed like they're getting stuck on something. I believe it has something to do with how I have them finding and moving at each other. When my NPC is on the left and monster on the right, they don't move to the correct distance of each other. It's very odd because the monster script is almost identical to the NPC script so they should behave similarly. 

I'll do some research tomorrow during the day and take another crack at it tomorrow. I'm still on schedule as long as I get this fixed by tomorrow night.

This is looking awesome! I love how readable your game is already--everything pops and is easy to understand. Wishing you luck with figuring it out--could it be a problem with scaling or the distances are just different for sprites of different sizes?

Day 6 and I resolved my issue. The "0 Transform" of my sprites was not actually the center of my sprites. I thought of it last night to test and found that if I reset my transform on my Tank sprite it sat a bit left of where it was supposed to go. Today I reset all the children objects to 0 Transform and after messing around a bit I got it working. My boss is still slightly off center, but I think that may just be a scale issue. It's just slightly off though so it shouldn't have much of an impact. 

Made a couple more enemy and ally prefabs as per schedule today. Enemies are very easy to duplicate, so that won't be a problem. Allies take a bit more time, but as of right now I only need a couple. I may look at somehow coding my Spawn Manager to combine random sprites to make procedurally generated allies, but that's gonna go on the backlog.

Tomorrow will be a long night. I'm going to make it so the heal beam has to be unlocked with an item, add power ups, and introduce mana to limit healing.

An issue that I'm going to have to plan to mitigate is that my sprites are designed for attacking just right and left. There's no animation for down or up attacks.  I'm going to have to figure out a way that sprites attacking each other are always on the same X-Axis.

Screenshot below is what I did to test where my sprites were versus where my code expected them to be. Once they were in the white square I knew they were good to go.

Congrats on reaching MVP!! 🎉🎉🎉 This looks so good! Excited to see what you'll add on top.