Hello and thanks for coming to read about my game and first days progress for the 2022 Christmas Jame Gam game jam.

The Game

The objective of the game is to keep the production line running producing presents. Every time the conveyor belts shut down, the timer starts to count down which denotes if you are going to produce enough presents by Christmas or not.

Objective

My goal for today was to complete a prototype and then spend the next few days building on top of that.

The Day

The Morning:

I spent the morning cleaning up my hard drive when I realized I didn't have enough space to start a new Unity project. After that was finally done and I was able to create the project the next steps was to import my engine and other useful packages such as DOTween, TextMeshPro etc. 

Whilst doing this, I was also thinking up a plan for a game. I had hoped for the Christmas Tree special item as I had a really good idea for it but unfortunately it lost in the polls, the winner is a Present. After several hours of  writing down ideas I finally came up with the idea to assist in the creation of toys and presents before Christmas is reached. It is essentially a resource management game.

After Lunch:

After lunch it was time to break down the work into chunks and create a list of essentials for the prototype, then some ideas for the full feature that I can pick and chose from once the prototype is done. 

Afterwards I worked on my favourite part (NOT!) art. I needed some very rough programmer art to start building out the mechanics and scene to see how everything will fit together. Thus this monstrosity was born:

The prototype consisted of, player movement, collection of resources, drop off of resources, presents moving along the conveyor belt, and a basic game over condition. I completed all of that except the game over condition which I am not sold on yet so it was best to not work on it anyway.

The game features event driven architecture which is great when it works but can lead to some nasty bugs. I had a bug where my Coroutine was ignoring the WaitForSeconds call. I spent a good hour trying to figure out how this was possible to finally realize in one of the Start methods, the same event was being raised (in error) thus causing a weird state of the Coroutine partially running at one point then finishing instantly at the next invocation. 

The End:

I ended the day meeting an Artist that contacted me and setting up a Trello board for us, up until this point all my tasks were jus tin a notepad. Lastly I decided to blog my progress again over the 5 days and realized that meant I need to write this now haha.

Wrap Up:

I am happy with the first days progress, I only ran into that one weird bug described above which wasted some time but the rest of the implementations went smoothly so far. We'll see how they hold up as I transition it from a prototype to a game. I am very excited to be working with an artist on this project as that is always the piece I dread.