--------------------------------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.