itch.io

Okay so since you want some of my thoughts, here we go. Be aware my standpoint is by no means the be all end all of game design and I consider myself very much a beginner like many others on this jam. 

So first when you are making a game, especially for a tight Deadline or a Jam you need to take some of that precious time to evaluate. 

You need to consider in the case of a Jam on how you wanna tackle the subject, in this case you went for the wordplay on pack as in a pack of wolves, very much like we did with our game. Then you probably thought of including  a Survival aspect, while we went a bit further with a stupid quote I had saying "What if we made a game, where you pack your wolf pack to go home?" and went from there. Since our strengths where in 2d we kept it 2d and made this "Snes Lion King-esque" Platformer with Metroid Vania elements.  

Why do I tell you this? Well this was decided very early on and we sat for a good 2 hours, pondering about the game mechanics.

In your case it felt a bit like you winged it as you went. You possibly started with some asset flips (which is entirely fine in a Game Jam as long as it's allowed, which for most it is, some it isn't) of wolves and possibly nature objects, started working on this small space in the Editor (I believe you chose Unreal if I remember correctly?  Good choice for 3d. And then you spent all this time on a player controller (or to implement bounding boxes and stuff like that. But ultimately decided to make your game work automatically over a weird Buy Menu (I say weird because it's inconsistent and  a bit hard to make out information, some things I had to click, some things where activated via keyboard press...) 

UI elements are a delicate task, which is almost like a science in and on itself.

There are some good tutorials on Youtube, some over complicated and some bad ones. Someone I look up to, who makes excellent Tutorials about UI (but in Unity...) is this fella here. Now I know this is probably not applicable 1 to 1 for Unreal, but the overall concepts of what he is saying should be.

The reason I mention this, is that your core gameplay loop involves this Buy Menu, so instead of the Controller, your focus should lay there. (Remember on earlier when I talked about a clear focus for the game from the start, this is where it comes in handy.) 

So let's go over the project once again, with a clear mind of what it's going to become. 

You start with the idea of a Wolf Survival game, where you have to gather food and water to survive and are able to recruit other Members, to grow your pack. Right away, this sounds like a solid idea to build from, after all the core aspects of every survival game to consider are hunting/gathering and group size.

Next we need to think about how we implement this into our game design. When you think about Survival games, many third/first person open world games come to mind, back in the days I used to play a lot of Rust and Conan:Exiles. But this kinda clashes with your theme of controlling it with a menu. 

You need to think about implementation of your core mechanics first and see what would make sense for the Game you are going for.  (In most 3d games, you'll find 2 things for UI design. Hotbars and either Inventories or Radial menus, for example. This has a reason.)

Since you have this Menu going and are quite new to Game Dev. Radial Menus and hotbars can be quite tricky to implement so why don't we scrap the 3rd Person controller but instead focus on making the core Gameplay of buying and Ressource gathering more fun?

Well judging the mechanics we have going here, this game would lend itself (like I mentioned in my initial Post) to be more of a Clicker game, like Cookie Clicker for example. Another way to think about survival games is a top down "Strategy Game" perspective.  Now I don't mean you should start making another StarCraft game, that would be scope creep, but you can lend yourself some design choices from the big games and try to implement them in a simple way for your Jam games! 

Why not make the camera top down, in a fixed manner and pan it only to show certain things happening in the background when you buy stuff in your menu? The StarCraft example would make for an interesting game I feel like, Buying pack wolves to increase your group size and allocate them to certain tasks, like hunting  etc. would make for a pretty engaging game and we haven't changed much about your design.

You would scrap your 3d Controller all together and have much more time to focus on getting that UI nice and clean and maybe add some particle effects to polish things happening on your background. Maybe you even got enough time to implement a Battle mechanic, where you have to defend your territory against other packs, by allocating certain Wolves to guard duty. 

I hope you see where this is going. But since this post is so long I will leave you to it for now and see what you think about it, maybe gather some questions and we can recollect again.