Hey everyone!

We're a small team of friends trying to make our first game: Froguelike. It's a pixel art 2D roguelike where you play as a frog exploring procedurally generated caves with a walking pot, that you can use  The plot is that you need to complete all recipes from a wizard recipe book to get a wish from an ancient magic pot, and make your frog village safe and wealthy for one more year. If you die, another "volunteer" frog takes over.

We're mostly just one programmer and one artist, with help from another amateur artist and sound designer.  We have a full-time jobs, so most likely won't finish this game completely by deadline, but we are excited to participate in this challenge. 

Good luck to everyone!

  Hi!

I'm going to post here every day of developing this game. We started working on Sunday, so I will start from this day.
so..

DAY 1 (Sunday) - Beginning

On the first day we started thinking about the idea of the game and did some general work. I (as the progammer) started preparing the Unity environment, creating the first basic scripts and objects, while my friend started making some rough sketches. Actually, there are two art works here, one made by me, which I use to test everything, and one made by my friend. I'm a really bad artist, you can understand that by the sprite I drew for the main character xD

Our first main character sketch. The pot here is on his back, which we decide later to make a separate liveable object.

So the first day ended with some rough sketches and a first prototype of the level generator. Basically it creates a level with rooms (8) connected by roads (9), by the parameters I give, like min/max sizes and number of rooms, general level min/max size etc. It's not the best algorithm and my first attempt at level generation, but it looks good at this stage.

I spent almost the whole day and night on this algorithm, making it acceptable for using, and started thinking about tile generating.

DAY 2 (Monday) - Map Generation, Lights and More Artwork

On the second day, we brainstormed about the gameplay and the general idea of the game. I spent the whole day working on tile generation, marking separated mini-biomes on the map and adding lighting to the scene. The hardest part was understanding how normal maps work and how to make good shadows and lights that are not annoying. I've drawn a simple wall/floor/road tiles, and made another tiles generator script based on the map array that generates before it. I wish to spend a week to make a really good generator, but with a limited time it's impossible to do something perfect at first try.

And after several hours of trying to add lights, ended up with this result

...which is more than acceptable to me. At first I tried to make some tiles in the visibility area lighter, but just spent a lot of hours and ended up with a bad looking result and lags, so in the end I just decided to stick with a dynamic Unity2D lightning.

Meanwhile, my friend did a lot of artwork and reworked a main characher:

DAY 3 (Tuesday) - Movements and Grid System

Third day is a day of movements and tile selection. I've finally finished with a moveable character, tile grid system, made selection of the tiles, jump animation and possibility to look around. All this stuff + some scripts optimization took all day to do. 

The more work we do, the more our project become messy, so it need additional time to clear the code and files.

At the end of the day added a script for generating decorative objects and a simple flickering fireplace.

DAY 3 (Wednesday) - Inventory, Items, UI and First Soundtrack

At wednesday I've made a loot of changes to the grid system and added chests and items spawn to the game. Now you can open chests and get items in your backpack. We've also added a simple UI, a backpack and notifications above the character's head.

Made a lot of rework of level generation, but it still sucks for my opinion. Experimented with some huge levels.

Also we did a first attempts in making a simple soundtrack.

And of course, my friend continue to fight at pixel art frontlines.

*Special thanks to my fiance Ann for helping with some assets and to my good friend Caroline for making a music

Half of the week has passed, and with some confidence I can say that we won't finish everything we wanted to, but we will really work hard these days to make a full cycle prototype. Enemies and the main fight mechanic are ahead!

Day 4 (Thursday)

Thursday was the most productive day for now. We were working all night drawing new assets and updating the existing code. I've completely rewritten the whole level generation, so now everything is more stable and it recognizes rooms (mini-biomes) correctly. I also finished with fully functional biome system, where you can create biome without updating the code, simply by creating a new object in inspector, with possibility to set chance to spawn, setting floors/walls with different sprites variations that also have adjustable chances to spawn, specific enemies, decorations and items.

My friend also did an incredible job drawing and animating a lot of assets.

I still need to fix some things with tiles generation, but in general it looks good, so that's it for this day.

Tomorrow we will be focused on the Pot mechanic, making more items and maybe will do a simple enemy.

I want to complete this devlog, so I'll mix 3 last days in one post

Day 5-6-7 (Friday-Saturday-Sunday)

We've made a huge work at these last days, starting from anooooother remaking of level generator, and finishing with a fight mechanics and enemies.

The first things that were done these days - Inventory and Crafting system. I've created a system where you can easily add a new items to the world, that will be spawning in chests. Also I've made a recipes system, so you can specify all the items you can mix to get a specific item or the effect (for example - explosion). With help of my fiancée we've added a new ingredients and potions, and my friend designed and animated our cauldron pet.

Potions are not working yet, but I'll update them soon.

Next big things that were added - turn-based system and enemies. Now when the enemy spot you, game switches to the turn-based  system, where enemies go after you and you after enemies. Cauldron is also involved in this system, so you should be careful with it (in the future updates it will have HP too, and posibility to move by the orders). Right now, there is only one melee enemy, and player doesn't have HP at all xD.

We were working last days and nights polishing existing systems and fixing bugs to make a workable demo, but unfortunately a lot of things still don't work as expected. In general, I can say that this game jam was a total success for us even though I understand that we won't win any places. We've gained so much experience just in 7 days, and got really excited and motivated to continue working on our first game.

Thanks everyone who read this devlog, people who run this game jam every year, and community, which really motivates to work hard on something interesting. And good luck to all other participants!