Hello all, this is my first ever game jam and I can't wait to get started. Enough about that though, let's get to the game.

My project, Dreampatcher, is an isometric dungeon crawler/puzzle game about a person who, while dreaming of a childhood memory, discovers it is not what they remember it as; they notice a gap for the first time, see important details missing. As they attempt to resolve the discrepancy, part of their mind attempts to stop them through their dream by attacking them and locking the true memory away. Only by revisiting the memory through their dreams and struggling against their own mind night after night will they know the truth, but will it set them free?

Dreampatcher is a short single-player action game that I will make in Unity. In total, there will be around 3-5 levels, depending on how much I can get done.

PROJECT GOALS

1. Programming
   1. Player
      1. Movement
      2. Attacks
      3. Abilities
      4. Health and status coniditions
   2. Enemies
      1. Movement
      2. Attacks
   3. Systems
      1. Music
      2. Spawning enemies
      3. Text boxes/story progression
      4. Boss fights
      5. Puzzles
2. Art (will try to produce what I can, will get from the internet what I cannot)
   1. Environment
   2. Character
   3. UI
      1. Health bar and status condition
      2. Abilities
      3. Currently selected ability
      4. Enemy health bar and status condition
3. Sound
   1. Music (will probably find some stuff on royalty free sites)
      1. main menu music
      2. different theme for each level
   2. Sound FX
      1. footsteps
         1. pavement
         2. grass
         3. dirt
         4. gravel
      2. a variety of punch/impact sounds
      3. hurt noises (human and animalistic/machinelike)
      4. click and button press noises for UI

Day 1

Made fairly good progress for the 4 hours or so I put in day 1. I've worked with isometric games before, so some of this stuff is familiar territory. I found an isometric game I made for a school project and took the movement system from that. Movement is surprisingly hard because of the way I accomplish the isometric effect; at  the of the day, it's not as easy as press up and move the player up because according to the gameobject foward is no longer forward. But at the end of the day we have a moving player, and that's where it all starts.

I also started working on the player's basic attack. The basic attack is a simply melee attack; unlocking abilities as the levels go on will give the basic attack a passive enhancement based on which ability you have selected. Right now, I have it working so that when you click on an enemy, it registers the click, determines if the player is in range of the enemy to strike, then strikes. It doesn't actually deal damage now, although that functionality is coming soon.

At the end of the first day, the game looks like this.

Player is green, the enemy test object for the melee attacks is red. It's not much, all placeholders at this point, but it's not going to stay this way. Thanks for joining me for day one, I'll be back tomorrow with another progress update.

-Medic

oh whoa nice! i actually don't think i've seen that many isometric games done for this jam and let alone in 3D so i'm interested in seeing more of this. it's cool that you're talking about how you solved some of the interesting problems so far with it re: movement.

UPDATE 7-24-17

Yes I know it's technically the 25th right now but be quiet.

First major update is that I've started a Trello board for this game, for those of you who are interested in a more concise version of what I'm up to an how I'm progressing. The board can be found here: https://trello.com/b/qLjNGu4x. On a side note I highly recommend Trello to other jammers who haven't tried it yet; it's flexible, easily editable, and it really helps keep track of things, especially with teams.

On to the game, and I've made a number of important scripting improvements. For starters, I've made a parent health class that will serve as the backbone for all other types of health systems in the, from the player to the bosses. The health system is an HP system, called Integrity Points (IP) in game. The health system also has two conditions: Burning, which does a small amount of damage every second over time, and Stunned, which temporarily immobilizes the character and prevents it from attacking. There will be things to be added in the future, such as resistances to certain types of damage for enemies, but for now this is a solid start.

I've also started to set up code for the player's abilities, which will also be carried over to enemy abilities. So far I've gotten one ability programmed, an area of affect attack that is centered around the caster. But more importantly I found a timer system online that allows abilities to have cooldown, which will be important for obvious reasons. The playable character also now rotates to face the mouse, meaning that the only remaining part of the player movement script to be completed is the dodge mechanic.

My plan for the next few days is to complete the player movement script, finalize the code for the rest of the player abilities, and make the cooldown class something anyone can use. After that, I aim to complete the enemy AI and attacks, and move into programming the game systems. After that, I we narrow down the design and make it pretty. I'll have another update for you guys soon.

-Medic

So it's been a while, and a lot has changed. I've sadly had to abandon the Jam theme in favor of something that would work with the art assets I've been able to find, but overall the project is progressing well. Since the last update I've implemented many things, and I won't get to all of them today, so here are the most important ones.

Gameplay programming for player and enemy is complete, save for some bug squashing. Players and enemies can move and attack each other, as well as die. I've also programmed a series of managers for aspects of gameplay, such as a system for pausing the game, a system to change audio tracks, and a UI system to display player and enemy health as well as status conditions and cooldown effects.

As we head into the home stretch, I'll be focusing on level design and boss design, and I'll provide updates when I can. I'll also be doing a postmortem in this thread when the jam ends.

-Medic