---------------------------------------------------------Day 1---------------------------------------------------

Unable to cope with the hordes of bug-like enemies continuously besieging your party, you - the healer in your small adventuring group - get separated from your blood-hungry companions and become lost in the vast caverns of the dungeon. Now, you must find your friends, convince them to leave, and escape, all with the only skill you have at your disposal: Heal!

So starts the journey. I'm going this one alone, and probably will continue to do so for a couple jams, at least until I've proven to myself that I can follow through with my limited knowledge. So far so good: I did the opposite of my plan and used my first few hours downloading asset packs from the Unity Asset Store and compiling a title screen instead of working on important things like a character/game controller, AI for both the enemies and your allies, either building or figuring out how to rogue-like the rooms of this dungeon.

Well, we'll get there.

Either way, it's good to get started, and I'm happy to be doing this in conjunction with so many others. I'm looking forward to seeing all of your games, and I'm excited for you to see mine!

Haha research and gathering assets is an important part of dev!! It sounds like a really good use of time honestly, even if you're just making screens. Love this concept, I'm excited to see how it'll turn out. Best of luck with the jam!!

I just realized that somehow I  was designing the whole game inside the canvas. As in all object placements and backgrounds and everything I was blowing up to fit inside the canvas. I was wondering why I had to make everything so big.

Thankfully, all I have is a few objects, two scenes, and some basic room stuff, so it's not too terrible to start over, though frustrating. This could have been a huge mistake if I caught it later.

Let's hope I make most of my mistakes in the here and now, and not later.

I really like rogue-likes, excited to see what you make!

I like the idea you have, and good thing you caught that early, good luck

this is really cool! such a fun idea, and I can really see it coming together already! good luck as you continue on :)

——————————-Day 5? Really?————————

After 2 days of professional and social obligation, I finally got back to this this evening. And by that I mean I spent 4 hours coding and checked none of it, hence the absence of a neat little progress gif. I promise I’ll post one tomorrow.

So far, I have most of the ally ai coded (though who knows if any of it works), including a hilarious little wander script that just has my boys wander ‘round the screen if you stand around too long.

Still need to put together a targeting system, and enemy ai, which shouldn’t take much. I have a VERY simple enmity system that I need to structure, then comes the bug spawner, then multiple rooms (roguelike?), then finally ally dialogue. Animations at some point. Oh, but I did do the scene transitions, as expected. Still a ways to go, but feeling good. 

This is so awesome! I really love watching this just go in the gif. Really love seeing the progress on this!

--------------------------------Day Too Many-------------------------------

I don't know if y'all were aware, but doing this by yourself is hard. It takes a long time.

Not to complain. As they say about languages, immersion is the best teacher. And to be quite honest, I'm pretty impressed with myself. I'm moving more easily through a lot of the coding stuff than I thought I would. I learned Unity through their Unity Learn program, and like a lot of the feedback I saw, a lot of it didn't sink in, and I've spent several months struggling to recall many simple things, getting fractionally through projects before deciding I needed to work on something "simpler" in order to figure out how to execute a certain mechanic.

But with this--and maybe it's the deadline looming--I've found that I'm working through problems instead of just immediately going to tutorials or stack overflow to fix my problems for me, and I am more often than not successful. For example: I programmed the entirety of the AI for my game without referencing any AI projects I'd put together before or tutorials online. None of it works, but I'm confident in the overall structure, and know that, with a bit of poking around and research, I can probably fix it up fine. It's not any of the fancy systems I referenced in an earlier post (FSM, GOAP, whatever), but it's AI. (Eventually, outside of the scope of the jam, I'd like to take this and make Behavior Trees out of it. It seems the most useful overall.)

Speaking of structure (and I was), outside of all this coding, it took me until yesterday or the day before to actually put together the structure of my game: all the rooms, what the player is supposed to do to beat it. It seems pretty late in the process to do that, but as a writer I've always been a "let the story tell itself" kind of guy, and I will say that, with as many of the pieces in place as I had, putting the game structure together has been pretty simple.

Okay, the good news and the bad news.

Bad news first: I'm not sure I'm going to get the AI and abilities totally working by the end of the jam. I'm disappointed that y'all (and thus possibly no one ever) will get to see this baby in complete action. I'm not saying it's going to be glorious, but I'd like people to see it in its final form.

The good news: I will have the "story" down, dialogue, game structure, exposition, et al. You'll wake up at the beginning, be able to go and find your allies hear them out, and exit the dungeon at the end. There's even some very very light puzzles to solve, which of course would be enhanced by enemy involvement.

Either way, I'm going to finish this game, even if it's after the deadline. It has already taught me a lot, and will have been a worthwhile experience. Thank you everyone for your help and kind words.

Maybe I'll drop a short dungeon tour here later.

------------Final Day of the Jam-----------

Okay, y'all. I got everything done I said I would in the last post. It's janky as heck, but it is currently a self-contained game.

In the coming weeks, I plan to implement all the Ally and Enemy AI, tweak and polish everything that's present here, and hopefully put together a little boss fight at the end. I'll keep y'all posted as those features are added.

I've linked it below. Check it out if you get the time, and thank you so much to everyone for your input and community.

Good job everybody!

I'd give this a post-mortem, but it's not finished! Check out progress here!

Thanks so much for everyone's input!