Hey !

Yesterday I was doing nothing on the internets and I stumbled upon a post about Devtober. I had originally planned to take some time off at work for the LDJam, postponed it to nerd on Shadowlands and found myself without the ability to do any of these two this month. That'll serve me : the joy of playing games is ephemeral but the obsession that comes with making them is forever.

So here I am !

Day 3 - Day one for me

I had a vague idea of where I wanted to go : something something (...) gun crafting. I started right away by making a rough base (Moving, Shooting) with placeholders and spent the rest of the day on and off on where I wanted to go visually. 

I usually enjoy making Pixel Art but Unity has no really good tool out of the box for this (the 2d pixel perfect camera works well with side-scroller and is, at best, uncooperative for anything else) and resolutions/screen ratios handling is a real PITA from my point of view. Finally I decided to give a go and spent most of my day having a half-assed pixel art resolution handler.

So at the end of the day it doesn't look like much work has been done on it but I'd rather have things like that handled right away than try tro cram it 10 minutes before the deadline.

Day  4 - Procgen ! 

Started working on a basic level generator.

I'm quite happy with what came with it. Usually I don't mind the fucked up mess that is my code during a 48/72h gamejam because - hotfixes aside - I'll never have to work on it ever again. Starting with the level generation was a happy accident : it forced me almost right-away to think about the overall architecture and on how I'll need to structure the differents systems along the way.

inb4 it's still a spaghetti monstruosity at the end of the month.

Long story short : made a level generator, tried some stuff visually to make sure everything was okay, started to implement it on one component (a minimap) and worked on the overall structure.

I still have a lot of work to do on it to avoid having some weird looking levels and actually a proper minimap but that'll be for the polishing phase...or before if I'm just too angry at how it works.

Aaaand it's the end of the week end, I'll see what I can do tomorrow if I'm not too tired.

Days 5/6/7 Small progress is still progress 

 If the covid19 crisis taught me one thing it's how much time of my day is actually wasted commuting. I'm lucky enough to be able to work from home 3 days a week but (and to still have a job at all) but it still puts thing in perspective. Day 5 and 6 were the days at the office.

Trying to find the balance between not dying of exhaustion and actually making progress in my project during the week will be the most interesting challenge to overcome this month. Usually I try to work on my projects when I have the right amount of energy but if I can learn to find a way to cram an hour or two over the course of those 3 days (2 with commuting, 1 to rest a bit) without neglecting any form of self-care : sign me up !

What's new ?

Now that the basics of room generation was behind me it's is "just" a matter of inserting the different elements using the map data.

I worked on the room views generation  then went to work on the actual room views. First thing done was the doors (updating the tilemap).

Days 8-9-10 - Where it's all coming together...sort of.

Damn, it's already day 10 ? Time sure does fly.

Day 8 - I worked updating the room collision. It was a nice manageable task to do during a weekday.

Day 9- Rest day.

Day 10 was a bit more productive : I managed to implement a big part of the room to room transition. I never had touch unity's event system before this and it was a surprisingly pleasant experience. It's always a bit hard to focus only on putting the mechanics in place and not add any form of visual information or feedback (I had to restrain myself not to add a simple camera transition from room to room) because in the meanwhile the game feels pretty fucking bland. I know it's for the best in the long run and it will avoid the trouble of having to refactor everything that might change. But it's still painfull :(.

So now I have a pretty rough working concept, the core of the game seems to be in place and I think I might be able to start focusing on actual gameplay and visuals pretty soon. Yay.

Day 11-12-13 - [St]Art

I always spend too much time trying to figure where I'm trying to go artwise, moving pixels around hoping that something will stick.

This time was no different, what was a coding break ended up taking much more time than I had anticipated. I'm currently working on a bunch of different tiles for the rooms. Procedural generation is a big time gain but I want to avoid the "copy paste" feeling as much as time allows me. So my plan is to randomize the room visual elements. I'll keep working on it for a day or two and I'll add more later. Maybe. If I have time or decide to push this game post-jam.

Current state of the tileset. Some will stay, some will be deleted, some will be reworked. and still a lot more work to do.

Day 13 - 18 - Procgen, art, procgart.

I feel like I'm getting close but the deadline is getting closer. I know I should've spent less time on multiple things but overall I'm just having too much fun working on this that I'm in full tunnel vision mode. I really hope I'll be able to finish before the deadline but whatever happens I feel like this might actually turn out to be a 2-3 month quarantine prototype thingy.

Here's the gif of the week : small randomized rooms. I'll get back into coding this week.

I actually wanted big rooms (21/9 tiles) but now I feel like I could go with smaller ones, I'll see about it.