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Day 8. Night.

Asinus here,

I really cleaned up changing scenes and persisting data. I wanted to make sure everything works as much as possible without involving the levels. I also wanted to make the "chase" dream simpler for now. It won't have the procedural generation but I took inspiration from the N-Sane Trilogy:

That's the easiest difficulty so the wall isn't moving too fast but it will start closer and end up moving faster than you can.

Here's how transitioning between dream and reality works now:

I'll need to work on lighting to make sure everything is nice but that'll come later. All in all, not bad progress today. Tomorrow will be less but I hope to get more progress on "survival" dreams and "nightmares".

Less devlogs were updated today. I wonder if everyone is super busy making progress.
- Frowning Asinus

Day 8. Noon.

Asinus here,

Since I didn't have much time yesterday, I focused on making the "reality" scenes so I can link up my dreams. I really don't have any art skills so they'll all be menus or exposition like these:

As you can see, the success or failure of dream sequences are measured in motivation. That will be the driving factor in whether the player gets the good or the bad ending. It's pretty simple but it serves the purpose I'm looking for.

I also did a lot of work establishing a central point to load resources and save/load player progress (through Player Preferences). I might change that over to JSON or XML so that I can have cleaner implementations of things like storing lists of information (i.e. skills a player chooses). This really helped because I can start to finish up the "falling" dream and use that to finish up the motivation increase and skill selection scenes.

The main menu's debug panel is pretty full now. It's exciting even though about half the scenes aren't working fully (or at all).

The rest of today will be more of the same: establish how dreams are "randomized" (I want the user to play the entire set of dreams before repeating any), finish linking up dream transitions (all the data that needs to pass) and progression to the end (adding continue buttons to incomplete dream scenes). Once that's done, I can focus completely on the incomplete dreams.

I actually don't like gravy but I'll make an exception.
- Frowning Asinus

Day 7? Noon.

Where did the time go? I wasn't feeling all too hot for the past few days so I didn't make any progress. I'll be starting up again but not until pretty late into the day. Here's a few more things that I've thought about.

"Falling" dreams
I need to confirm that this still works after I made a few changes to my prefabs. Other than that, I need a way to load in some player data to determine which level of difficulty to use and a way to save the completion data for "reality" phase (which is required for all the phases).

"Nightmares"
From working with my basic enemy AI, I figured out that I can use Fp to move across XZ at any angle. Now I have to decide how Fc comes into play. For the sake of progress, I might make the camera follow without user control for now. Once I have player movement correct for that, I can continue to work out how to incorporate the camera. Thinking back to games like the Sly Cooper series, the direction upon input is dependent on Fc but you can still go in all directions and rotate your character without having to force Fc and Fp to be the same (ignoring the Y axis). After that, I'll have to figure out a way for the boss to move and take action. The player actions can be taken from the "survival" dreams.

"Chase dreams"
I haven't touched this one yet. I should probably set up a simple path for the camera work first. Then I can worry about a wall that follows the path to the exit and kills the player on touch. After that, I can add the maze feature. At that point, the wall will need some implementation of path finding. Time to break out the ol' A*, right? I can probably get away with just using BFS, the mazes will be static once created.

"Survival" dreams
A lot of UI work for skills and health. I should give some health bars to the enemies as well. Using player skills and attacking still does nothing, especially since there's no hitbox or range for player attacks yet. The skills will be an interesting part since I need to figure out animations, projectiles, maybe some events, and who knows what else.

"Reality" phase
I haven't really talked much about this so far. My original intentions were to have this all be in 2D to provide a stark contrast between reality and dreams. This kinda plays into the idea of dreaming of heroics, the player can see all the exciting and heroic things in greater depth. But now, it being in 2D might make it less work for me to do in the week remaining. I was also hoping to make this more than a few glorified menus to select skills and check progress, but with no new ideas and the lack of time, it'll probably stay as that.

As you can see, even if this is the extent of the game, there's still a lot to do!

I'm going to make an early half-way point retrospective because I'm already here. The first two days were very gung-ho but turned out to be a lot of redoing work. I could probably have avoided this if I spent the first day doing tutorials but hey, who wants to do that right? Day 3 and 4 had some solid work but I need to stop hopping all over the place. This is definitely a by-product of me not planning carefully and overestimating my ability. I honestly thought I could complete each dream within a day or 2 without much trouble so I didn't need to plan out beyond the order of tackling them. So far, it hasn't come true but we'll have to tally up hours at the end of the jam.

These were my goals for this jam (aiming at 3/5 completion):

• (B)uild some interact-able landscape.
• Spawn and script enemy (AI).
• (P)rocedurally generate something.
• Incorporate the "dream" (t)heme.
• Do something new and (l)earn.

I have definitely completed goal L and AI (it's simple but it's there). I've kinda done goal T, though I won't claim it complete until I have the "reality" phase completed. So all in all, I got what I asked for and everything else is gravy. That said, I want more gravy.

Take care of your health!
- Frowning Asinus

Day 4. Night.

Today was a lot of building and rebuilding. I really wanted to make sure I could reuse as much as possible between my "Survive" dream and my "nightmares". I reworked how health is handled (tracking is in the health UI which is a prefab), how inputs are accepted (it's own manager which reads the player's class to determine how to attack), and how skills are used (I might change this up a little bit). The skills and classes are all ScriptableObjects now and can be loaded from Assets. This will make things easier because I can load up all the pre-designated information and sprites whenever I need them. I want to move enemy type data and spawn points into ScriptableObjects so I can add controlled variation.

I also managed to work on the spider AI a little bit. They were all sorts of crazy and ran into each other a lot. I added a new BoxCollider to act as a trigger in front of them. If they see someone there, they'll stop moving until the coast is clear. I think I had my condition had an extra "!" which took me way too long to remember.

No visual update today. It's not very different from last time (I have a few more UI elements) and I don't have my mouse on me.

Still a lot of work to go. I'll really need to make things look nice as well. Or I can work on the "reality" phase so I can actually start persisting class/skill selections....maybe after I have another dream complete.

Always schedule cat delays. She was extra friendly today.
-Frowning Asinus

Your art is looking really good. I wish I could say the same for my own work. I'd love a sneak peek at your first level so I can tell what the gameplay is like beyond the fact that you can shoot things. I imagine that the levels are similar in vein to Bastion where you travel along each level for a little story and designated action spots. Mini-bosses and NPCs make me think your world can grow pretty big. I'm excited to see more.

Day 3, Night.

Captain's Log.

Development has been slow. Third person camera and movement has been pretty tricky. I spent a lot of day 2 watching and following along tutorials, many of which came from the previously mentioned Board to Bits channel (great Unity guide, looking forward to more content). It was a great learning experience for the environment but I felt like I already knew most of the concepts. I managed to get something working and had the player move corresponding to Fp. But sometimes, trying to move on the axis negative would keep going in the axis positive direction.... At other times, changing the direction of Fc won't adjust how the axis positive/negative works and the player will keep moving in the previous orientation. It's a mess I'll have to look back into.

I decided to work on a different dream. This is the typical "survival" dream, commonly a zombie infestation or just being confronted by something. I decided to have this in first person and have the player immobile. This would give the feeling that the enemy is "in your face" (well, kinda) and it's a standoff that you have to just deal with. This dream will be heavily affected by the user skill choices. More on that part in a bit. Like the "falling" dream, the "survival" dream is timed. If you survive the whole duration, you get full points. I might implement a kill to spawn ratio for bonus points but it might be unfair. Here's what I have so far (please ignore the giant cursor).

The enemies there are my miniature spiders who have come to destroy us all. The cute button nose is there so I don't get too scared (and so I know which way they're facing). No player attacks are implemented yet but that's a huge system that I have to establish. The enemy AI can damage the player enough to end the dream though.

For the "survival" dream and the "nightmare", player chosen classes make all the difference. I intend to have the three traditional classes, the mage, knight, and rogue. They all have the same amount of HP but they'll have different defense levels. The mage has range attacks while knights have physical reaching attacks. They deal the same amount of damage but slightly more than the rogue. The rogue can use both ranged attacks and physical reaching ones at the same time to make up for that. Even aside from that, after "nightmares", the player can choose to invest in 1 of 3 skills spread amongst the classes. I'll probably need some balancing for this.

Players can only choose one skill from each row. Once they choose it, they'll have it for the rest of the game, so you can be a healing knight who can enrage their piercing line for 60 Damage (if Enrage lasted longer, it might be too overpowered). Of course, this is hopes and dreams. I don't know if I'll get this far into developing the game. Some of these skills (the first level) feel easier to implement than others.

Watching NorthernLion play Until Dawn was part enjoyable and part "why can't I stop, I have stuff to do".
-Frowning Asinus

Do you intend to have different types of ammunition? Perhaps different enemy types require different subsets of ammunition to hurt them? Or, if you have a single type of ammunition, maybe as a bonus feature you can add in player customization of what they shoot. They are a lucid dreamer after all.

Looking forward to seeing how crazy these lucid dreams can get.

It looked like the brain was eating things Kirby style. Not sure if that's what you intended but I found it funny.

The player feedback looks and sounds great. All you need now is a catchy tune so you can get it stuck in our heads forever.

Day 2, Noon.

Hey Devlog,

I spent some time refactoring my "Falling" dream. Now I can easily change the difficulty by increasing the number of onscreen circles, the speed of "falling" (which is actually the speed of the circles rising), circle size, and how long the dream lasts. Many thanks to Board to Bits for the tutorial series that explained all this. I also changed up the system to use events instead of checking during the Update() of all the nooks and crannies.

As for the "nightmare" movement problem, I was thinking about how different games handled the situation. When the Forward of the player (Fp) is different from the Forward of the camera (Fc), most games will rotate (either in place or while maintaining momentum) from Fp to Fc over time. I think this means setting Fp to be a new vector made of Lerps from Fp to Fc by a factor of deltaTime so the character will eventually face the same direction (with some tolerance). From there, I'm split. Either it becomes a matter of breaking Fp into X and Z components and then applying InputAxis or just apply InputAxis directly into X and Z and it will make sense because the player is facing the same direction as the camera. Gotta test that out later today.

For the "chase" dreams, I might be following along this tutorial by Catlike Coding to procedurally generate the maze. It'll be interesting to see what parameters I can adjust to change difficulty. I'm aiming to have each dream be shorter than 5 minutes so the mazes won't be as large as in their example. Hopefully that won't affect the algorithm too much. Still debating on adding jumping to the maze. I guess it's not really necessary huh?

No update gif this time.

It's not so hot today.
-Frowning Asinus

Wait, is that a brain firing text? So the text has a hitbox and that's what you're using to fend off the flying invaders enemies cigarettes? That's an interesting take on the shmup genre. Is it continuous or just one phrase at a time? Do you intend to have it bend as you fire?

Your pixel art is pretty good. Everything is distinguishable and the way you simulated lighting works great.

Day 1, Night.

Dear Devlog,

I really wanted a system to change scenes so that I could worry a little less about linking things up and a little more about finishing things. I ended up making a simple menu following one of the Unity tutorials. Very nice introduction though I wish it covered how to transition through code as well. I'll have to search that up tomorrow so I can transition out of my phases. Here's what I have so far:

Excuse my messy cursor work, I was recording in a pretty small resolution. Having a debug menu will be super helpful. I'm tempted to show this scene anytime I press ESC so I can quickly change to other areas. Then again, each "dream" will be pretty different.

As for dream #2, I decided it was a little early to try and tackle procedural generation. I think it would make more sense to figure out how to strafe and manipulate the camera first. Those are the biggest problems I've been having after making my menu. It's easy to move along the X or Z axis but that makes for clunky play (maybe it'd be ok if you were making the first few Resident Evil games). At first, I was going to make an over-the-shoulder camera for this next dream type. Then I remembered what makes Kingdom Hearts so effective. The camera work was terrible but it was very up close and personal with Sora and his targets to emphasize the threatening enemies. I switched to a close orbiting camera for similar effect and I'll save the over-the-shoulder for the chase dreams.

Here's a little sneak peek for bosses instead.

Yup, there's going to be boss dreams. I call them "nightmares". Makes sense doesn't it? I think one of them should be a giant spider. I'm just too much of a wimp to find a spider model...or scale it up... I need to find bosses I'm not afraid of.

I'm debating whether I should add jumping to "nightmares". It would make sense for the "chase" dreams and I can make elevated areas. But for fighting a boss? It just means more work to have mid-air attacks (that's a long ways away).

I had forgotten how much math is involved with understanding camera work. Lerp and clamp is your best friend, along with the great tutorial making Youtubers out there. I should also focus more on making prefabs instead of customizing for a single scene. And generalizing code so I can scale up difficulty as the player progresses.

Hope everyone else is having a good time.
-Frowning Asinus

Day 1, Noon.

Dear Devlog,

Decided to take a little break. Here's what I have so far:

It's pretty basic right now but I'll add some more detail to it (probably). The biggest trouble was finding a way to keep the player on screen. Originally, I had the player falling indefinitely from an insane height with a follow camera directly above. I had walls put up on the sides so that the user couldn't go off to infinity. But as soon as I touched a wall, the player would bounce off. Google told me to turn off Kinematics for the player which works fine since I don't need it to interact with anything else. Then I realized it'd make more sense to have the circles go up and keep the player's y-position constant. No more camera work, no more infinitely tall walls, "missing" a circle happens when they go above a certain y-position. Simple. The caught to missed ratio will eventually be used to score the reward going into the "reality" phase.

Next steps: add scene transitioning into the "reality" phase. It would be nice to clean up some code so that I can easily customize the difficulty. Oh, and I need to spawn the circles smarter. Maybe procedurally.

Or maybe I should work on another dream. Dream #2 is finding your way through a maze. This is a part that needs procedural generation to be really nice but I can start with a preset. This dream would be a combination "lost" or "being chased" stereotype. I would love to add a giant wall of spiders or something chasing after the player. The scoring for rewards will be time remaining when the maze is completed. If the player runs out of time, there might be a punishment.

Can today get any hotter?

- Frowning Asinus

Day 1, Morning.

Dear Devlog,

Hopes are high. You can probably tell from the title of the game that I found a way to incorporate the "dreams" theme. It's also a reminder for myself. Every frowning donkey wants to grow up to be a smiling, honey eating, carefree bear. Anyway, I was brainstorming what I could do and I figured my first game can be a bit of a mess. It's OK if I don't have the polish as long as I create a foundation for myself so I know how to do things in the future.

Let's review our game plan before starting out.

Mechanics:

I Dream of Heroics will be split into two "phases", reality phase and dream phase. I hope to make these two drastically different in visuals so players can understand when they're "dreaming" and when they're not (or maybe I should blur those boundaries for a proper mind-bending experience...).

In the reality phase, the player will make choices that affect their dream phase. For example, players can only increase their stats and/or skills in the reality phase.

As the player drifts off into sleep, they get to make a choice. Do I dream of being an intelligent wizard? A brave knight? A crafty rogue? Their selection determines their ability to interact with the environment in the dream.

In the dream phase, the player will face various types of dreams. Each dream can be considered a mini-game with some kind of goal. (In)Completion of the dream will affect the reality phase. I want these to be more stereotypical dreams.

The first one I'll work on will be the "falling" dream. The player will fall toward the ground which (sadly or thankfully) continues to move away. I'll keep the goal here simple and just have the player try to move through as many rings as possible.

Story:

Do I look like a storywriter? No. I'm a donkey. I don't have much of an idea for the story yet. It's a little difficult to find a proper "reality phase" motivation for the "dream phase" actions. While story should never come last...it's coming last. Like I said earlier, I would rather have a silly project that gives me lots of know-how than to pump out a very polished game that lacks content.

Let's see how far this goes,
Frowning Asinus

1. Hi there! What's your name? Want to introduce yourself?

Hey. My name is FrowningAsinus. If that doesn't suite you, I have a few more aliases such as Green or Donkey. I don't like pina coladas but I do like getting caught in the rain. I can't do yoga because my balance is worse than a baby's first attempt to sit up but I do have (at least) half a brain. 

2. Did you participate in the last jam we held? If so, what do you plan on doing better this time? If not, what's your reason for joining?

This is my first jam. I have nothing better to do with my free time. Just kidding (sorta), I've always wanted to start making games and this seems like a perfect chance for me to get started. Now that I signed up for something, I can't just quit halfway.

3. What games are your favorites? Did any of them inspire you, or made you want to make your own?

Final Fantasy Tactics gets first mention because it deserves more attention from SE.
I grew up playing a lot of RPGs like the Final Fantasy series. I grew into strategy games like Age of Empires, XCOM, and Civilization.
I really enjoy certain mechanics in Dark Cloud (1/2), Kingdom Hearts (1/2), XCOM Enemy Within, Final Fantasy (7, 9, 12, T), and probably plenty more.

4. Do you have experience with game development? What did you do/with what engine?

I took a course that worked a little with Unreal 4. It was a nice experience where I made a split-screen driving/basketball game. It was pretty difficult to work on because we decided that everything except the level had to be done programmatically. Not so smart for a bunch of first-timers on a tight time schedule.

5. Tell us about something you're passionate about!

I have started a small culinary journey to become the best cook within my circle of friends and family.
I relax by absorbing manga or anime. I really look for a historical setting  (e.g. Vinland Saga) or great stories (e.g. Silver Spoon) but won't turn away from watching classics (e.g. Sailor Moon, Dragon Ball) or just mindless fun (My Hero Academia).
I really enjoy development, especially anything involving a UI. Outside of game development, I am currently playing a lot with Android.

6. What are your goals for this game jam?

I want to accomplish at least 3 of the following:

• Build some interact-able landscape.
• Spawn and script enemy AI.
• Procedurally generate something.
• Incorporate the "dream" theme.
• Do something new and learn.