The game I'm working on for the jam is a 2d Unity game, where you're flying a kite. I've only done a couple of tutorials in Unity, and a bit of C# programming before. It's my first jam too, so I decided to keep it to a simple game where there's only really one thing moving, and focusing on making the movement feel good. Basically, my goal to have the kite make me want to make "whoooosh" noises when flying it around.

The goal of the game is to fly your kite up to a certain height. You increase your height by hitting certain areas on the screen. If you don't hit any of those within a certain time, your height starts to drop again.

I started out just implementing a triangle that could move around the screen, and decided to control is using analog sticks on a controller - pulling back on the left stick would be like pulling with your left hand kite string. I'm pretty happy with it's movement now, I added a bunch of extra behaviours on top of the basic steerable triangle to make it feel a bit more kite-y:

• Faster in the centre of the screen, slower at the edges
• "Plummets" downwards when moving towards the bottom of the screen - gains speed quicker if headed towards the ground
• Pivots around one of the wing tips when turning
• Controller vibrates when hitting edges of screen or target

Managed to get a placeholder objects to hit working, they're just stars at the moment, and have the background move up, with a little parallax effect on the ground/sky. It's all a little placeholder art currently, something to work on later in the jam.

My next big things to get done are:

• Something needs to happen when you hit the floor. Proably the kite shouldn't go underground.
• Add ability to pause the game
• Spawner for the target objects
• Victory condition

I love this idea!

OHH this is a really solid game idea and i like that you're focusing on the feel and handling of it!

Last couple of days have a had a lot less visible progress. I've add a sort of fail state - if you crash into the floor the kit gets reset for launching again. To launch, you have to pull backwards on the sticks about half way on each stick, then it begins flying.

The big thing I've been fighting with is a way of spawning the target objects. I want to be able to eventually have targets with different spawning behaviours, so tried to make the spawner class generic, and use an interface to require target types to implement a LegalPosition method to check they're in a legal position. I thought I'd start simple, and just have a target type check it was within x distance of other targets, but I cannot get Unity to check for the existence of other target objects within a radius properly. I'm trying to use OverlapCircleAll on a specific layer all the targets are assigned to in order to find how many are within a radius of the new one, but it will only return 0 and I have no idea why. Going to stop and see if I can think of a better way of handling it in the next day or two.

In the successes column, I did manage to get obstacle targets working though, which are things that cause the kite to sink instead of rise when hit. These were a pretty simple change of value and sprite on the earlier targets, starting to see the value of Unity's prefabs. Oh, and made a replacement image for the kite which looks a bit more stunt kiteish.

Immediate goals:

• Make the spawner apply spawning criteria properly.
• Implement win condition

My extended battle with the spawner is finally over. It now spawns stars up to the limit when some go offscreen. However, on the way this did happen:

my god, it's full of stars

But it's behaving nicely now, not 2001-ing so hard any more.

I've been working on the visuals a little since, adding some movement to the background as it felt a bit static. I've replaced the background with a gradient that goes from light blue to black, and created some animated clouds and birds to moved across intermittently. It does make it a little more lively looking, along with some wind sound that gets more prominent as the kite goes faster.

Current look: http://imgur.com/a/Gn71o

There's a win condition too now - when you get all the way to the moon, you win (aim high). Everything is basically working now, and looking okay, so next steps are to make the gameplay a bit more varied.

Immediate goals:

• Stop the birds spawning in space
• Create 2 new, trickier target types (possibly one you have to hit from a certain direction, no other ideas yet)
• Final target to hit on the moon to trigger a win
• System for target groups (ones that spawn and interact - like maybe you have to hit them all within a certain time to get any lift?)
• Victory animation