BTP Jam (Day 3)

Aight, day 3, and my 2nd day of development.  A lot of the day went with programming. One of the surprisingly easier things to do was the dialogue system in terms of programming was the dialogue system. I'd done a couple of dialogue systems before using simple console applications, but never in unity. So I looked up a Blackthorneprod tutorial on the subject and it was pretty straightforward. 

Next up was the "random" generation of blood droplets. I put random in quotation marks because in reality, I've pre-defined a set of spawn points around the map where they can spawn from, and then I have them spawn from a random one of those. At the moment they can spawn on top of each other, but that should be easily fixable on the morrow. 

I also made the blood droplets intractable. If you collide with one of them you gain one "health" and spawns a particle effect before destroying itself. I also added a despawn script to the blood particle effect so they don't accumulate in the background, which could hurt the game's performance. 

Speaking of particle effects, I also added a very faint particle system to the background. (not sure if it's even visible in the gif). Just thought the background needed to become a little more animated and I thought the faint "flicker" of other souls was fitting.

I also made it so that the "light at the end of the tunnel" creature shoots out small projectiles. I'm not super satisfied with their movement yet, as they tend to slow down drastically before hitting their target, but hopefully, that shouldn't be too hard to fix. I also added a screen flash for when the player hits them. The flash also becomes more opaque/intense the less life you have. 

Yeah, that was pretty much it. I have most components for the intro now, so tomorrow I'll be working on setting up the first scene. I'm also starting to have a clear idea of what I want the core gameplay loop to be, which will probably look something like (Combat encounter - Movement puzzle - Combat encounter).

Oh, and I made a messed up version of our little bloodsucker. 

BTP Jam (Day 1-2 (Technically 2)) - BLOOD!

Another day, another game jam! Blacktornprod GAME JAM #3 (or "BTP jam" for short) is the jam this time. It's a 7-day Jam, which is something I've never done before so this'll be interesting.

I usually always jam with the Headless Hobo crew but thought I'd take the opportunity to do a solo jam for once. If anything positive ever came out of this whole Covid-19 situation it had to be how it pushed me back into doing online-jams.  Anyway, let's get started! 

DAY 1

Day 1 wasn't particularly eventful. Pretty much the entire day was spent playing Warhammer 40k with a friend. While I didn't really have any idea of what kind of gameplay I wanted, I was kind of excited about making a game about a mosquito for some reason. Thus, I managed to make a quick doodle in photoshop of my protagonist before I dived into bed. 

DAY 2

... and I still had no idea about what I wanted to make, so the day started out with me doodling down the first ideas that came to mind. 

Well, so far so good, while I still wasn't sure about what I was gonna make, I at least had more to work with... and ever so impatient, I decided that was all I needed to get started working. 

The first thing I did was to get the protagonist animated and moving inside Unity. 

One idea I came up with was that the player was going to start dead, so I also made a soul version that you could move around. 

 

        
For some reason, I'd also decided from the start that I wanted a side character commenting throughout the game. I liked the idea of it being a crazed eye from the ideas page I drew and got to work on that. 

Next up I wanted the player to fight the light at the end of the tunnel, but no matter how much I tried, I just couldn't make it look interesting at all. So instead I tried to invasion some kind of character instead and made the doodle above. I liked it right away and just went with it. 

While the antlers were interesting on the little rodent creature, I did decide I needed something else to spice it up. The straight vertical bits were added to just make it a bit more unique. 

Lastly, I finished up some animations for it.

Yup, that pretty much summed up day 2. Didn't get all that much done this day either, but since I've still got about five days left, I don't really see a reason to hurry just yet.