You think you get too many notifications now? In the future you will get them every 10 seconds, and you will check all of them out. To not do so would be considered an aberration.

This is where the jam theme took me for my submission "Aberration" (https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/51/aberration in browser ld embed playable) - my first unity game and gamejam ever.

Here is a dev diary in pictures and gifs:

Saturday

Wire up the notification timer events and subscribers around 2 PM:

Not freezing Z rotation is never not funny:

Finally done with the two main "enemies" in the game: surveillance systems, and NPCs. Get too close and you get influenced back into mindless consumption.

It's getting dark outside, and I'm really questioning how the hell am I gonna turn the above into a game. Oh and I also want to build a separate mini game to simulate hacking surveillance terminals. Scrapping the minigame is not really an option as I need it to tell the story.

Play around with some lights and a trailrenderer and get something going:

It's getting late but at this point I feel I at least have the basic mechanics down. Close to midnight, I get started on some tile art.

Moved on to characters. Thankfully 16x16px is not a lot of pixels, and I get a few characters done quite quickly:

Time to sleep.

Sunday

Wake up feeling optimistic, I have most of the pieces in place and should be able to combine them into something by the end of the day.

Minigame tiles sort of done:

Combine them tiles with the above lights and trail renderer and get this (some scene elements not shown for no spoiler reasons)

Take the main tilemaps and game mechanics and the first level is built

The rest of the day I fiddle with the editor, tile pallets, ui elements, and try and put everything together. End up with two levels two mini games and a decent amount of writing and story.

I get ambitious for my title screen art for all of about two minutes before I realise im never going to have the time. I do get the main concept done however and use it as a logo of sorts.

Finally with about two hours to go I get started on sound. - Pick the whirly piano in GarageBand for it's soft dreamlike sound, improvise a piece on my keyboard in the only key I sort of know, and boom, got my first original song ever. It's not much but it's honest work (I'm actually surprised how much I don't hate it) - you can have a listen to it on the title screen. - Smash the generator buttons in sfxr, mess with the sliders a bit, and some sounds effects are now also in the game.

With 60 minutes to go I spend about 45 trying to get the webgl output to look good in the LD embed window and finally get it done.

What an adventure this weekend's been. If you'd like to try my game I'd appreciate any feedback. Playable on the LD game page here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/51/aberration