The Day

The Morning:

I spent the morning setting up the mood system which is influenced by you handing out spirit. Villagers will either accept or reject your offer, if they accept they become happier and increases the joy factor. I fixed a bug where you could give items (spirit) away without actually having any. One of the last critical things I needed to put in left over from the prototype was villagers stopping when the player is close to them. It is hard to give spirit away when the villager is running from you. 

Lastly for the morning, I implemented the store/storage where you can refill on Santa hats, candy canes and holly to distribute.

After Lunch:

I spent the early part of the afternoon with UX improvements to the mood system primarily so the user is quickly aware if an item was rejected or accepted by a villager. I had a bit of a panic moment shortly after because I couldn't make a build on my machine. Thankfully I have setup full CI/CD so even if I can't get a build locally, I can grab one from the server. 

I also fixed Santa's fly over to be more apparent, audio triggers and also game over state change after the fly over. 

The End:

For the last part of the day, I entered hell....I mean art land. I spent a good 4 hours trying to draw a few simple sprites...un-animated. This really started to kick my motivation in the balls because I am just flat out terrible at it lol. Given it's a jam, I don't have a lot of choice but to move forward though, that deadline is ticking. Other than art, I fixed a bunch of bugs related to AI pathing, and other collision detection problems.

Wrap Up:

The day was a success....I think. I was hoping to spend the whole day on art and get something looking kind of decent but I failed at that. I have also started to really panic because I picked an art heavy game, a lot of variations of villagers are needed. I fear that there will only be 3 duplicated all over the level. Oh well, it's a Jam what else can I do? It's too late to turn back now and start a different game.

Time to wind down before hitting the hay. Unfortunately I think a large portion of tomorrow will be a right off as my brother is supposed to come by for the day.

Good luck (and good night) to everyone and my fellow jammers.

PS. I still cannot get images to show up in-line in the blog, so this time I just attached a few at the top. One shows the first cut at the shop (items just on the snow haha), another shows the calculated nav mesh and finally one of the current state of the level.