Man, yesterday and today were pretty much a lost cause.  I got sick on Saturday with a head cold of ever-increasing intensity, so my productivity for yesterday and this evening pretty much dropped to zero despite spending a bunch of time staring at the project thinking I was working.

With all of my assets created on Saturday, I planned on spending all day Sunday on gameplay mechanics and programming, things I figured I was much better prepared to jump into.  With such a good day of progress on the first day, I really thought my game idea was within reaching distance for the Jam.  It’s sort of a bummer to have crashed halfway through when I was having so much fun with it, but in the end I got what I wanted most out of this round – a better understanding of how to model something in Blender and how to put together a basic music loop without spending a hundred years one either.  I’ve got some questions to look further into on these, and there’s plenty of things I didn’t have time to do (like texture and rig any animation).  Overall, though, I feel much more confortable with these tools.  It’s amazing what a dedicated day of sitting down and playing with them will do.

An in-game screenshot showing an active character in the movement phase, with movement radius visualized.

I did get some basics implemented, but in the end I don’t think it’s enough to consider an actual gameplay loop so I couldn’t submit it to the jam in good conscience.  So what worked and what didn’t?

What Worked

Assets first – Working on the models and music first let gave me a few early endorphin bumps seeing my progress on stuff I don’t normally even get to.  It was a lot of fun seeing these very “physical” things come together instead of seeing a bunch of grey boxes moving around.

Pathfinding in Unity – Once I got a chance to play with it and look through the documentation, the API is pretty simple and getting it up and running was super straightforward.  This is a really nice feature for rapid prototyping any kind of indirect movement (either AI controlled or, in my case, executed by moving a unit from one spot to another).

What Didn’t

Visualizing the movement radius – I really wanted this to be something similar to XCOM’s movement area, but I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to calculate that region without having a literal movement grid for characters to move around on.  If I had a discrete space like that, I could have just brute-forced the problem and checked each cell.  I started this whole concept with the goal of not having a discrete space, though.  I tried things with the built-in pathfinding in Unity and raycasting out potential paths from the character, but eventually I pretty much punted to move on to other things and just drew a circle around the character using the excellent Vectrosity library.  I’d like to revisit this after the jam to figure out how to do

Unity projectors for user interface stuff – I honestly didn’t expect this to be a big deal going in.  I wanted to project a contextual pattern on the ground to signify selected units and potential actions.  I remembered working with a projector way back when I had run through some Unity tutorials to do things like slap a blob shadow on the ground under a character.  Hey, thats exactly what I want to do here!  After ages of playing around with texture import settings and possible shader combinations, I realized that the projected texture (even at all white) was way too dim, that it was taking light from the scene and there wasn’t a shader that would ignore this and just show the pattern the way I drew it.  I haven’t had a chance to look into writing custom shaders (maybe for the next jam), so the projectors were pretty much a dead end.  I ended up slapping the texture on a Unity plane and moving it around the scene.  Crude, but it worked.  Unfortunately, it doesn’t conform to the terrain and has other issues.

I’ll be working on this idea for a while even with the jam over with.  I think it has some potential, and I’d really like to implement some of the artistic and thematic elements I didn’t get to.  Here’s one last look at the scene:

A birds-eye view of the scene at the close of the jam.

Tags: gamejams, ld25