Introduction -

Since this is my very first game jam, I want to try doing things by myself and touch aspects of game development I haven't tried yet. So even though game art or sound is not exactly my forte, I wanted to give it a try and maybe even have fun with it :)

Concept -

The game is a 2d POV platformer set in a zombie apocalypse. As the player, your goal is to heal your friends who turned into zombies by shooting at them with a healing gun, while avoiding obstacles.

Day #1 -

The Plan:

For my first day I decided to focus on the main mechanics of the game rather than focusing on design and animations. I read in a few places it's good practice to start with this so I thought I'd give it a try before moving on to more advanced parts of the game. Here's what I set out to do for today:

• Player Movement
• Player Jumping
• Player Shooting
• Player life(no bar yet)
• Enemy Movement
• Enemy Lives(no bar yet)
• Enemy going other way when "dead"
• Enemy attack player in close range
• Hazards falling
• Platform disappear for a few seconds after landing

* I wondered a bit if some stuff are must-haves for prototyping(like the platforms), but since it wasn't much effort and I thought it would bring value to the game, I decided to spend a few minutes on it.

Progress:

Insights -

Overall I think I made some good progress today although I did end up spending time on some of the mechanics more than expected. Had some trouble figuring out the the player shooting and enemy movement mechanisms but despite all thought I'm pretty happy with what I've done so far.

Super impressive progress. Looking forward to the next steps!

Love how thorough your process breakdown is! The pitch gets right to the point, and it's really nice seeing all your mechanics laid out. Great progress! Excited to see more!

This is awesome I'm loving the progress gifs! 

Day #3 -

The Plan:

Ok so today a lot of work has been done on the UI side of things. I also went back a bit to previous mechanics to try to make them feel a bit more dynamic and enjoyable to interact with. Here's what I've been working on:

• Game timer
• Pause menu
• Game over screen
• Save best time and display in game over screen
  
• Main menu
• Improve Enemy Generation
• Platforms generation 

Progress:

Insights -

Today I feel like I managed to cover a lot of ground. I thought I would finish things way earlier but had to push a few more hours of work to get where I wanted. I think I spent the majority of the time working on the Game Over screen and solving a few annoying bugs along the way.  Luckily the rest of it went smoothly, which I think I have past me to thank for, for implementing the main mechanics beforehand.

With day #3 over, I think I can safely say I've finished all the critical dev items I had in mind. I'm definitely going to come back to this in the polishing stage and still have some bugs to fix, but for now I think it's time for me to focus on design.

Awesome progress! You're doing well! Good luck

Day #5 -

The Plan:

Continuing my work on design elements today I made a few environment some UI assets:

• Ground Tileset
• Platform with breaking animation
• Hazard Falling animation(now officially defined as an asteroid)
• Hazard Smashing animation
• Street lamp
• Clock 
• Timer Frame

Progress:

Environment - Tiles, Platform, Asteroid, Street Lamp

UI - Clock, Timer Frame

Insights -

Starting with the characters a day earlier really helped me understand what kind of environmental elements would go well with everything. I originally wanted to start with the characters because I thought they would be more time consuming, but it coincidentally it just made sense to work that way. 

Working on design is still very time consuming and quite a challenge for me. Despite that, I found the process really enjoyable and it looks like things are starting to take shape pretty nicely. 

Day #6 -

The Plan:

Today I spent my time trying to work on some background and UI assets:

• Background
• Main Menu
• Pause Menu
• Game Over Screen
• Health bar
• In-Game Controls UI

* Unfortunately I did not have enough time to finish everything I wanted so the rest will be completed tomorrow

Progress:

Background -

UI - Main Menu, Pause Screen

Insights -

Phew... Today was super challenging! I wanted to finish all the UI designs but this part was really difficult for me so it took a looot of time, especially the background. I'm not entirely happy with the outcome of everything but due to time restrictions I'll have to settle. Tomorrow I'll quickly finish up the remaining items and move on to the next part. 

Day #7 -

The Plan:

Today the plan was to rush through the remaining items of design and move on to apply it all in Unity:

• Game Over Screen
• Health Bar
• Player Animations
  
• Enemy Animations
• Hazard Animations
• Platform Animations
• In-Game Controls UI

* Decided to put the game controls UI aside for now since it's not critical for the game. I might work on this if  I have extra time.

Progress:

In-Game Screenshots -

Insights -

I'm very happy with today's progress. Seeing everything come together so nicely made all the hard work and effort pay off big time.  Although everything was mostly done on the coding side, as I started adding animations and graphics I began coming across various bugs. I thought these bugs were critical to solve at the moment  to continue implementing everything else so I spent some time on that. There's still some stuff to fix, UI to add and more, but I definitely feel like I've conquered a huge milestone. 

Wow - looks amazing 😃 thanks for the great Devlog 👍

WOW yeah no kidding this really came together so quickly! The UI is seriously so polished.

Day #8 -

The Plan:

Today my main focus was all about adding different kinds of effects to the game to make it more alive. Before I could do that though, I had to go back to implementing UI elements and finish what I couldn't yesterday. Here's what I did:

• Implement Main Menu Screen Design
• Implement Game Over Screen Design
• Hazard impact effect
• Shooting impact effect
• Rain effect
• Dust effect on jump
• Lighting Effects
• Enemy health bar green glow

Progress:

In-Game -

Insights -

I spent most of the day working on implementing different effects as well as polishing some UI design. Came across a few more bugs along the way and managed to solve a few from before. Had a bit of trouble figuring out the lighting system at first but after that it was smooth sailing. The game is already in a good condition and I feel great about where it's come thus far. Next part is all about the sounds and music which might prove a challenge since I'd like to try to make it myself but that's something I'll have to deal with tomorrow.

Day #9 -

The Plan:

Today was all about the sound so my plan was to look for the right tools to get the job done for both effects and a simple background music:

• Shooting
• Shot impact
• Player hit
• Player death
• Platform break
• Hazard break
• Rain sound
• Player jump
• Enemy zombie noise
• Friend healed sound
• Background Music

Progress:

Unfortunately don't have much to show this time since today was just about sounds, but at any case you'll get to hear it for yourself when you play the game :)

Insights -

Wow today was intense. Had to work extra hours figuring out the best free software to make sounds effects and background music. Felt like it took me too long than it should've but ended making all the sounds I needed. Still need to make some sound balance but overall it's great. 

Day #10 -

The Plan:

The plan for today was to work on critical bug fixes, moving on to minor ones and finishing with some extra polishing. 

Insights -

Today went very well. Had to put in some extra hours to get a few critical bugs handled. Tomorrow I'm planning to do final testing, some last polishing and then I should be ready to upload the game to itch.io. I'm doing things a bit ahead of time because I won't be able to work on the game during the weekend. At any case, I think the game is in a very good place and if people end up liking it I might add even more stuff to it.

Day #11 -

I finally finished creating the initial version of the game! There's a lot of stuff I wanted to do but due to the lack of time I decided to finish things here and later on gradually add stuff just for the fun of it :)

I already created the draft of the game page so tomorrow the plan is to simply make the page look a bit nice and informative enough for anyone coming to visit.

Day #12 -

Today I worked on the game page on itch.io. After making final tweaks, the game is finally and officially live and submitted to the jam!

Although there's still a lot of stuff I wanted to do with the game, unfortunately I won't have time to do it by the deadline. I do feel good about the base of the game though, and I do see myself adding more stuff to it overtime so this might be just the beginning.

Postmortem - 

Now that the game is officially published, it's time to reflect on the process, conclude and think about the next steps. 

The Idea

As I was looking for ideas, a voice inside my head kept reminding me all those YouTube videos saying "Keep it simple" and "Less is more".  So I tried to keep it simple and even came up with the idea pretty quickly. I had some doubts at first, but I sticked to the idea, trying not to judge myself too much and reminding myself simple is good and that no matter what happens, it's going to be a great learning experience . 

The Planning

From the moment the idea popped into my head, I began planning the structure of the project. Starting with the tasks I will need to complete, the specific days and hours I will be working on them, and the estimated duration each task will take. So I broke everything down to small tasks and started estimating the effort as best as I could while  placing the items on my calendar.

Conclusions

What worked?

• The Idea - Right at the beginning of the process I realized that although my idea is pretty simple, I added elements that are not critical for the main mechanic of the game. So rather quickly, I decided to get rid of elements I initially planned to work on(like the shield, super blast pickups) so I can put my entire focus on the MVP. Although I thought the ideas were cool, I felt like this was a good choice and it actually did end up giving me extra time to work on other things.
• The Planning - Wow I felt like the planning was so important! From the start and until the end, I was very happy that I had everything mapped out. Even though I couldn't predict everything that needed to happen in the project, I did feel like it gave me a sense of direction, and it really helped me stay focused on what I needed to do instead of getting distracted with random ideas of things I could add. 

What didn't work?

• Time Management - So yes I planned a lot of stuff in advance and I knew exactly what I needed to do each day, but I think I kind of messed up managing my own time anyway. Very often, whenever I came across a challenging task, I would end up spending more time than I should trying to finish it. Which basically meant, I stayed extra hours on some stuff, overworking myself and going to sleep very late. This made me very tired and exhausted towards the end and it's something I definitely need to work on for next time, knowing when to stop and letting my body rest.
• Resources - Since this was my first game jam, I wanted to try doing everything myself, including sound art and the development. I'm familiar with development but when it came to making design/sound assets I really struggled since I had to learn basically everything on the go. I remember spending a whole hour, just trying to figure out how to record something in a certain music studio app. I eventually had to give it up and felt like I completely wasted my time. For future jams, I might bring more people to work with me on the stuff I'm less familiar with, but just in case I end up doing it all on my own again, I decided to start working on my game sound/design skills, just enough to make my life a bit easier next time.

Next Steps

After publishing the game I couldn't help but feeling that while everything was ready, the game wasn't really as challenging and fun as I had hoped for it to be. That's why I decided to work on the game a bit more after the jam, just enough to make it a bit more enjoyable and appealing for the player. So during this coming month I will be working on modifying the game with the aim to publish a new version. I will mostly focus on:

• Changes following jam community feedbacks(which was super helpful!)
• Update a few extra stuff I didn't have time for during the jam.
• Add a few more mechanics. 

That's it, hope it wasn't too long of a read :)

Btw, this will be my final post in this thread. For future updates, you're more than welcome to check out my game page.

**If you're interested in staying tuned with my upcoming games you can follow me on social media - 

• Facebook
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• YouTube
• DeviantArt

Thanks for reading!