This is part 3 of the Christmas 2021 Jame Gam post mortem, if you haven't already read the first 2 days, I recommend you do before reading on.

The Day

The Morning:

For some strange reason I was up at 4am, I usually get up around 7 but regardless I started grinding.  I started with writing a tutorial level that guides the player through the simple mechanics. This didn't take too long to bang out (as expected). I had an idea at 4am to quickly draw different body parts of characters and then see if I can generate random villagers at runtime. This would solve the art issue as there are way too many villagers to uniquely draw individually for the jam's timeframe. To my surprise this didn't take too long to implement but I got caught up on a Unity issue.

Apparently if you create a parent game object with a non Vector2.zero position and then add children, all of the children are moved and not placed at 0,0 as expected. This took me some time to figure out but eventually resolved it by initializing my parent at Vector2.zero and then after I build the whole structure, I move the parent to it's random position in the level.

Those were the core systems/items I wanted to take care of today and I was finished by 9am along with a bunch of bug fixes.

After Lunch:

A lot of my afternoon was eaten up by other responsibilities but I did manage to get a few things done.

The screen shot cuts it off but it says "Chance To Be An Asshole", I had always planned this mood and its behaviour but left it out from the initial integration as a nice to have feature. With the great progress in the morning I was able to implement the asshole mood. I won't spoil what is special about this mood but it was fun to play with.

After implementing the asshole mood, I spent a bunch of time doing some voice overs for the main character and the villagers as well as Santa. Unfortunately they mostly all sound the same but you have to work with what you got, right?

Lastly, I noticed a bug in the path finding and made it worse to the point where my level looked like a rave (green lines are paths to positions).

I finished off the afternoon fixing the rave, I mean pathing issue.

The End:

Unfortunately my evening was mostly eaten by other responsibilities but I did manage to do some little things. I skinned all of the buttons in the game as well as put a default title in each screen that is applicable. I also doubled the playing area of the level so it wasn't soo crowded and that was pretty much it.

I found a game breaking bug right before I had to leave for a squash match where if you go in and out of the level several times, it would randomly generate all of the villagers but they were invisible. In the end, this was caused by NavMesh Plus (that awesome tool I mentioned earlier) randomly assigning a x rotation of 90 to my game objects even though I had both of the following set:

agent.updateRotation = false;

 agent.updateUpAxis = false;

This tool now has a bit of a bad taste in my mouth. In the end it was a simple fix, I just force my sprites transforms to a rotation of Quaternion.identity. Up until this point I had been testing the level directly, not going through the main menu. This is a great reminder why you need to do full integration testing as well, given this was completely random and only happening when coming from the menu sometimes.

Wrap Up:

The day was a success, I went in with a few major things I wanted to accomplish and plowed through them in the morning with a lot of time to work on some bugs (all known ones squashed). 

Tomorrow is another day and I should have the morning and afternoon dedicated to the game so hopefully I can finish it before the evening.

Thanks for reading.