Hello and thanks for coming to read about my game and first days progress for the 2021 Christmas Jame Gam game jam.

The Game

The objective of the game is that you have to spread Christmas spirit to people in the town before Santa's fly over. If you haven't spread enough spirit, Santa will cancel Christmas. This game is pretty ambitious for the tight time and limited personal time I have this holiday week but I am giving it a shot.

Objective

My goal for today was to complete a prototype and then spend the next few days polishing as I am not artist so it's going to take me a long time to do the art. I also realized a few hours ago that the game I have chosen requires quite a bit of art so I may have bitten off more than I can chew.

The Day

The Morning:

I spent the morning  setting up an empty project and whipping together some HUD art which I suppose I didn't need right away but I wanted to have that piece in place so it wouldn't change. After a few hours I started on  the actual prototype. I started the prototype with character movement, the HUD in place as well as a placeholder villager.

After this step I implemented the ability to target a villager and pass them some Spirit. Right now the spirit does nothing but in the future it will influence how Santa feels on his fly over.

After Lunch:

After lunch I decided it was time to make my villagers move around. I tried out a new package for enemy pathing as I didn't want to manually setup a grid in code, calculate the screen positions vs the pixels etc. I thought there has to be a project where I can just paint a tile map and certain layers would impact the AI pathfinding. Luckily there is, I strongly suggest checking out NavMesh Plus. I had some struggles getting it to work but after I did it was great. Of course while integrating with that, I needed more of a level and more villagers.

The End:

I ended the day with Santa's fly over and I got stuck on a stupid problem...for 3 hours. I couldn't figure out why he was flying by properly but was not triggering the audio triggers. I then realized no audio was playing, not even the sound track. By this point I should've taken a break for a few hours to recharge. I was pouring over my code and couldn't figure out why it wasn't working....in the end? Stupid, stupid, STUPID mistake. I forgot I clicked the Mute Audio button in the unity player. F@#K!

Wrap Up:

So I didn't get as much as I had hoped to since I ran into the audio problem, I think without that I would've been able to complete the prototype but oh well, tomorrow is another day.