Its time for some sleep! I always try to sleep a decent 6-8 hours on the first night, it preps you nicely for the upcoming all-nighter towards the end of Ludum Dare D:

But here we are with a quick progress update, Ive been working on bringing my own (built from the ground-up) C64 editor into this game since its the core 'thing' the game is built around.

Here it is in action:

All that text is interactable, just like a real C64 running BASIC. Im trying to get the setup as close to a C64 as possible, without spending the entire jam working on a text console! ie its not going to be exactly the same - ideally Id like to have 2 modes, a retro 'just like a C64' editing mode and then a more modern mode like notepad, but that would take far too much time.

So its pretty simple right now, the only command it recognises is 'RUN' which of course doesnt do anything yet. But the functionality for reading input is there and thats what took a bunch of work. Theres also a syntax error thats thrown for anything the compiler doesnt understand, which is basically everything else right now. Tomorrow I'll be getting some more BASIC commands working, so you can write your own scripts and provide some logic :)

The rough idea of the game is that some silly AI bots (which Im most of the way through creating their dialogue system) accidentally produced an army of tanks with Commodore 64 chips for brains... a slight issue considering the tanks are about to be needed! They're employing you (and antagonizing you a bit) to write custom code for their tanks - to keep them alive!

A couple of final shots, the UI and game prototype/blocked area right at the start of the jam, after 1-2 hours work:

And here is the UI after a bit more work earlier tonight:

I certainly feel like Ive once again bitten off more than I can chew with this idea. The text editor has a lot of tricky things going on, which took some time to work out, and I cant say Im very familiar with Unity's text system.. until now anyway! So yeh, its very much looking like the remaining 1 day and 9 hours of the COMPO wont cut it... so Im very likely going to go for the JAM instead of the COMPO. But Im having fun and Im enjoying the challeges of this little game, its a lot different to anything ive worked on in the past, so lets see where it goes over the coming days!

Additional stuff for day 1: I made sure to get out today and get some fresh air and exercise! And eat some good food :)

Thats it for this update, I need some sleep!

As always, best place to follow my work is on twitter: