Geez, it's here again, eh?

Meme Regime is back on the case, working with our same three members. Vanea is on programming, and she's a wizard Hexed is on music, and she's great at it And I'm on art duties. For some reason I might not actually be terrible?

Also, we have a new fella working with Vanea. They go by the name of "Gears4Speed", and we're super stoked to have them this time around. The bottleneck in the past has been closer to coding so having two programmers will make everything so much smoother.

We'll be using Unity, FLStudio, Mixx, Mixcraft 8, Paint.NET and Aseprite, and some assistance programs like WinSCP for some FTP shenanigans (namely for me and Hexed to deposit finished files directly into the game's assets folders) and Github for the wizards to sync their own arcane scrawlings.

Hopefully we make it into the top quarter of the event this time around!

We accidentally started making a game two and a half years ago. Realizing our skills were a shadow of what we'd need, we participated in a ludum dare together and have been taking part in every one since. We still have a lot to learn, but we won't give up.

This time around, we want to try to make something with progression, as we've discovered we have a lot of difficulty in explaining gameplay mechanics to players. All of us dislike tutorials in games to some degree, but our image of what a tutorial should be is very clearly at odds with what has been required for the features we've put in our games. It's our greatest hurdle, and the plan is to overcome that with a progression system, and maybe learn what it means to make an engaging and fun tutorial along the way.

We're aiming for the top 20% in all categories. Here's hoping we don't make an ugly baby.

Last night we had a majour problem with floating point imprecision in Unity that took an hour and a half to fix, but otherwise, things are going pretty great! I've already got all the basic art for our game and today I'll be working on animations and texture variants, and drawing up the "main antagonist" of the game. The plan is to get all art done by tomorrow, when I can start helping to design levels.

Our composer got the main soundtrack done yesterday, and she'll be working on sounds today. The music this time around is actually going to be on multiple tracks, like our game 'Kessler' from last jam. We really liked how that turned out last time and we're hoping it'll push this game just a little bit further than our previous games.

Vanea's going to be finishing up the code for all the majour functions of the game, and hopefully by tonight the game will be in roughly a final state. Now, if the codebase is completely finished by today, we probably won't stop working on it. We may become open to the idea of a responsible application of feature creep, and even without that, we can surely add some polish.

Before I go, here's a little taste of one of the mechanics that was finished yesterday. https://gyazo.com/599530363b51be16afbaabf3aacb51ce

Good luck to all of you in your endeavours this jam! Stay positive, take breaks if you're stressed, and drink lots of water.

Perhaps my predicitions yesterday were slightly optimistic. Texture variants are going to be done tomorrow, as a last day thing (they aren't vital to gameplay), but all of the animated textures are done and we gave the game an aesthetic it was really needing.

We also didn't get a floor installed in the game, and the "antagonist" still needs to be programmed, but everything else is done, except for The Big Thing: Level design.

Now that I have github and have gotten some experience with using unity for the first time yesterday, I've come to a conclusion. Level design is going to suck. Like, seriously. We haven't ever made a proper editor for this sort of stuff, so we're stuck using unity's built in stuff to copy, paste, and move selections of blocks into place and, geez, it's just going to hurt. Not looking forward to today.

...Is what I would say if Vanea and I hadn't come up with a fantastic idea last night.

We're going to convert image data into level data. She's super excited she gets to learn to code something like this, and I'm super relieved I won't have to suffer with the unity editor. Really looking forward to today.

Also, I need to make a floor.

Good luck to all of you!

I guess it's a ludum dare then.

We're in for game number 6, and maintaining an unbroken streak of LD games since we started 3 years ago. For programs, we're sticking with Unity, aseprite, Paint.NET, and a music program, and if we feel real bold, Magica Voxel. Last time was fun but still average, though, as a trial by fire, there's few better places to learn new techniques than the Dare.

Time to begin.

It's not a ludum dare until you crash your game engine. Game is supposed to be sort of an ice physics sidescrolling puzzle platformer with instant death mechanics (It's cursed and we love it), so the natural place to start is collision detection because we don't have a game without it, right? 8 hours in, and progress is being made, but she's starting to get really annoyed as every solution leads to more problems. Started with infinite friction and jittering, then corner troubles and jittering on tile seams, then slipping through walls, then sliding along and through ceilings...

Long story short, we tried to have collisions set momentum in the approaching direction to 0. But, since the player is by definition touching a surface during a collision, the code for collision detection became an impromptu recursive function. Unity could not handle it.

She's certain we're close to a breakthrough on this. I, for one, believe her. But it's going to be a trial, especially when I can't look at code without going cross-eyed and this is our first foray into the wonderful world of side-scrolling jumping games.

Our programmer spent literally all of Day 1 trying to get a functional collision system for a platformer. Finally got it to the point where floors work properly, but walls and ceilings still bug out hard. However, when you can't reach your goal, just move the goalposts! We're now making a runner game, as removing ceilings and making walls fatal will allow us to continue with what we have. Maybe a little bummed that we won't have the puzzle platformer we were excited for at the start, but the new concept is getting us fired up, and I won't have to remake sprites for a new game style! Plus, the music that our composer worked on will fit thist style of game even better than what we were going for before.

2 more days until jam ends, and things are looking good. I'll keep you posted!

Hoping to make something. Hoping that something is good. Got a job since my last dare and haven't been doing as much art as I have in the past, so hoping I'm not too rusty.

Everything has been coming along surprisingly well and amazingly smoothly. Art hasn't been an issue, the music tracks are bangers, and the features have been being coded at breakneck speeds. This was shaping up to be one of our best dares yet!

And then, not ten minutes ago, when I pushed the new sprites through github, all the code that was done since we woke up this morning just disappeared. It's not in the recycle bin, it closed out of Visual Studio, dropped right out of unity and wasn't found on github. It's gone. She tried to use some "worktree editor" thing, but there was seemingly no hope in its unintuitive shell. She also didn't push her code at all today. If anybody has any solutions at all about anywhere to find code that was, at many points, saved and compiled, we would love to hear them, because, as it seems, she's not sure we can actually finish the dare now. We might even settle for a simple explanation of how it could have happened.