Hi!

Just started work on my game for the Jam. I've decided on creating a platformer with a generated world (based mostly in a cave) where the player explores a cave to find special resources and fight monsters.

I'm making up the story as I go along, but one thing I wish is for the player to have limited amounts of light, so the player must either stock up on coal or oil to burn for light before each entry into the cave, or find light sources while exploring. 

Today was Day1 so I worked on the most important thing: platformer movement and collisions. For simplicity I will be only using a tile-based map without slopes or uneven terrain.

Here is a gif of the movement so far, I want a fast-paced feel to the movement so that the player is rewarded for skillful movement.

Next I will implement a dash movement for more variety as well as start working on generating the base levels.

Day2:

I worked on adding some animation to the player character to give more feedback. The animations, along with some tweaking to the acceleration did make the movement feel better. Its not perfect but I want to focus on other things.

After the animations were feasible I started working on the level generation. I tried a few different approaches.

First I tried generating everything in code, but after a while I felt that the levels would probably become very boring, or impossible to complete.

Next, after looking at the map gen for Spelunky, I attempted to do something similar with Unity's Tilemap. I created a few custom tiles which had a certain probability of spawning in the map which was pretty cool. Then I tried creating Template rooms using Tilemaps and Prefabs. I wasn't really happy with how the editing of each Tilemap worked, and it felt like I was fighting Unity the whole time.

Finally I settled on using simple text-files for the room templates which worked the smoothest. Even though editing the templates in a text editor isn't the most inspiring thing in the world, it works.

Next steps will be to create more room templates and add more tile types.

Then I can work on putting more things like enemies into the world.

Wow! I love watching your little guy move! So expressive!

Alright, so I spent way too much time trying to refactor some code so that it becomes really simple to add new characters or entities to the game. It didn't work for a long time but I finally managed to get it working. Glad I kept at it.

With that new code we can add the first monster to the game!

Introducing the super cute but also deadly (when I implement a health system) SLIME.

I even had some more time tonight and it felt simple enough so I added some health display and damage to the player!

Didn't have any time to work on this during the weekend but today i'm back! I added UI elements so that the player can see how many of each crystal they have and also implemented fireballs that the player can shoot using their collected red crystals!

Shooting:

Besides this, I've been thinking about what to make of this game. I'm leaving for a small vacation on Thursday and won't be able to work more on the game after that. So my plan is to implement a few more room templates for the level generation, add "spikes" that the player must navigate around and finally add a simple boss at the end of the game. The player will have to collect 10 blue crystals around the map in order to unlock the boss room and fight the boss. I've never implemented a boss fight, so it will be a fun challenge.