I'm in!

This will be my first ever jam! I'll be doing the 72 hour jam to give myself more time to get SOMETHING done. I'm only just starting to feel like an actual novice hobbyist game developer, not just someone who says they're thinking about making games. That being said, I'm still an absolute beginner and at best can say that I kind of know how to use Unity, ish.

I'll obviously be using Unity for my engine, and I'll kludge together my graphics and sound from whatever I can make work over the weekend. Graphics will probably be Unity basic shapes and maybe some Asset Forge stuff if I'm feeling fancy, and I guess I'll try this Reaper thing people keep talking about for sound, if I get that far.

Well, I have something!

I decided to make a tower defense game! I'm not sure why, I don't have a huge interest in the genre, but I came up with something that worked for the prompt and seemed doable, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ The prompt tie-in is that you start out with more than enough power to run your defense towers, and you get progressively less every round, while the enemy line up stays the same. So the first couple of rounds let you plan where you can cut back when you have less resources.

So far, I've got some little enemies moving around a path, and towers that shoot them. I guess all this might not have been a super challenging task, but I was surprised by few major roadblocks I ran into. I guess I'm more comfortable with Unity than I thought! I was particularly proud of being able to create a good targeting system for the towers. It took a bit to come up with the proper data structure, but once I got it down it worked shockingly well and I haven't see any wonky behavior yet!

Obviously I need to work on the models and textures, but it works! My next step is being able to arbitrarily place towers, which I think will be a pretty meaty task, but once I get it, the rest of the basic game structure should be done! I have high hopes for having a decent something done on Monday!

Whew, I finished it! I guess I scoped low enough, because I managed to finish everything on my minimum viable product to-do list, and a couple things from my bonus list.

I'm happy with how it turned out, overall. ~~I'm not sure it's terribly fun though. I clearly didn't spend enough time playing and tweaking the game. The idea was the best I could come up with for the prompt, and I mostly threw myself into making it as feature complete as I could. It works, but I pretty much played the game to bug test.~~

Screw that, this is the first game I've ever made! AND I made it in only 3 days! I learned a huge amount and I MADE A GAME! It's fantastic! I was able to solve a lot of complex programming problems that I wouldn't have had the first clue how to approach a few days ago. I'm much more comfortable with Unity now, and next time I'll be able to make more stuff, better, and faster! Not to mention I'll have learned how to use better modelling tools, and learned how to use an audio tool by then.

This whole event was a great experience, and I highly recommend anyone who's hesitant to just go for it! You're probably more prepared than you think, and you'll get better way fast than you could have imagined!