I’m doing this LD in bursts. There’s a lot going on over a weekend in my household, so I can’t do sustained periods of dev.

Last night before the jam started I checked out Spriter, thinking it might be a good way to do sprite anims. I’ve known people who’ve used it and had great experiences with it, so I played with it for a bit and made sure I could pull anim sequences into Unity and set them up. All was well. File that away under ‘if there’s time to add animation…’

This morning (Perth (Australia) Time the Jam theme was announced. I sat at the breakfast table with my team (their ages range from 7-13) and we talked about what we could do. We settled on an idea dubiously titled ‘Trouble Places’ which has been kicking around for a while.

It’s a platformer where your character is a mix of two animals – a head from one and a body from another. Each has its pros and cons, it’s abilities and liabilities. There’s melee and ranged combat. That’s about all we know. It might end up being local multiplayer just so that levels and so forth don’t need to be made.

We shall see.

Burst#1 was me getting some of the basic 2D platformer assets going in Unity, writing a camera that follows multiple objects at once (think Smash Bros.), and then setting the player object up with a health bar, the ability to pick up weapons, and of course the head / body split.

We came up with a bunch of ideas for animals, their abilities, and ways they could evolve as you power them up. Octopus. Turtle (technically he’s a tortoise). Elephant. Crab. Owl. Rhino. Frog. Chameleon.

Main concerns at this point are getting the structure of the player object heirarchy right so that all the bodies and heads will work when switched around, and having enough operability between various game systems (weapons, stats, movement) that the various abilities wont be too onerous to code in.

Here’s a screenshot with the three animals I’ve currently implementing using temp art I grabbed off the internet. All mixed up, Elephant, Turtle, and Octopus.