Start of the Project

I have been actively working on different type of games regarding my personal projects. However, I've never had a cycle of a game that one can play as complex as the gamejam one. 

First of all, I had researched about how to GameJam. As it was stated by Brackeys in "How to GameJam" I've had my preparations and several game ideas. I couldn't hype myself for one of them so I went for the first one which is:

"A man who fights off enemies by using his abnormal/experimental way of engineering skills." 

This evolved into a project of tower defence. Where an engineer is trying to protect his daughter from unknown enemies by building towers as a result of unpredicted experiment (involving his daughter too). Due to the fact that I love rogue-like elements, I've tried to implement an idea of going back to first day every time of failure. And, the players would experience to realise that first day is not real or is it real? Or is the start of the game is the first day or not? Thus, players are required to solve it through playing and understanding words of the engineer, daughter and the MagicStone.

The player which is us who plays the game helping engineer to collect enough resources to build towers. You would have to make choices to build where, when and what. A wrong decision would be fatal for the player. Therefore, some other mechanic in addition to Rogue-like and tower defence mechanics, small resource management mechanic would be available. 

Development Process

For self-satisfaction, I've chosen a path to be mostly alone and produce anything from scratch. However, I've breached this rule few times.  I am going to try to be more elaborative for each day.

Day of Theme Declaration:
          It was an exciting moment but in fact it was a day I couldn't spare time. Therefore, while I was dealing with some other things I spent the day thinking about what I should do for the entire gamejam.

First Day:
          The day I had watched and collected information before I made a decision. It was a crucial process for me since I'd be focusing on one idea and going after that idea. Since it was my first jam, I knew I was going to read a lot of documents and try to create some scripts for hours, I knew that I would have  poor time management. 

However, I've trusted my skills of finishing a game with tower defence and rogue-like mechanics. At the end of the day, I prepared all the sources I would be needing. 

Second Day:
          This was the day I'd started my project properly. I prepared a project in Unity 2020 and imported essential packages such as Cinemachine, Text Mesh Pro and Universal Render Pipeline. 

Second crucial thing for me in that day is to decide the graphics. Since, I am not an artist the most basic and fastest thing I though I could do was to create all the assets as pixels. Most of the assets had been drawn by me in 64x64 canvas by using, a free drawing application, Krita. I wanted to use both X and Y axises for movements like in Stardew Valley, so I had to prepare a tilemap which I had never done before. I might have spent hours for tutorials and ways of drawing the tilemap. In the end, I had a painful experience of wrong dimensions which resulted me wasting my precious time. 

Once I was done with the tilemap and learn how to use tilemap in Unity, I used rest of the time drawing simple trees and stones to put around. At the end of the day, I prepared a simple layout of the map with a shortcut for players.

Third Day:
          I had started this day with a hope of being more productive than before. Even though I had had some extra work to do irrelevant to the jam, I found time to produce some more assets and build the world more. Second day, I had prepared few characters and enemies which ended up with me building some simple scripts for them in the third day.

Here after I added all the assets, I felt that the game was looking too simple and in need of more touch. As I couldn't spend more time producing assets for the game, I had some researches about 2D lightning and implementation of it. Since I had suspected way before that I could use the system my pipeline was there already. I used some detailed lightning and added a touch of a flashlight on player's head. It made the game a bit spooky and built an atmosphere around it. Now the game was looking more "delicious" than before. It gave me hope to produce something fun and engaging.

Fourth Day:
          This day, I had to start detailed scripting. I prepared few main scripts such as "Checkpoints, Enemy Spawner, Tower Firing Sysmts" which all of them connected to each other. It took my whole day to decide all check point locations since the enemies are Lerping towards each checkpoint through out the dirt road for each turning point and preparing all the scripts. 

However, everytime I tried to implement something new big or small, due to lack of experiencing building something like this and some bad programming design flaws, I experienced some major bugs. I couldn't figure out since I had tried so many times so I had to call the day off. Meanwhile I was developing  these crucial scripts, I've had some side scripts so make other small things working. Such as, location of the construction bases and how to build towers OR woodcutters.

Fifth Day:
          Fifth day was the day I decided to declare war on my bugs. I battled towards so many rewritten scripts and figuring out by googling specific needs through google. Even though the battle was tough, I was able to win in the end. I was able to send enemy waves which would increase over some specific amount of kills. The towers would be built by spending magicores and woods. Woodcutter would provide some woods to build more. So, the player would have to build woodcutters too. 

My other plan was to finally implement the rogue like element where the day would be setting to first day after a defeat when the engineer loses his daughter to enemies but still hold the amount of magicores that had before failing to protect the daughter. I had made a decision to create a complicated and programming disaster gamemanager to deal everything I had to do. I've created so many complicated scripts connected to gamemanager to set the day to first day and had same features as the first day. It worked and it was setting back to "Day 1".

Sixth Day:
          This was the day I would be putting everything of myself into this project. Even though, I had spent long hours in front of my PC, I was still behind the schedule and after this day, I had to release the game. So, I went on a journey of working 18 hours which ended up me building most needed stuff for the game. Since, to be able to make the game as a game or draw the storyline from somewhere, to make people see the progress of the development... (Which is a hard thing since visuals are the mere part of the entire project). 

I worked with my friend to make the SFX and music from scratch. He helped me with the program we were using. He was a pathfinder for me and I even used his voice to produce wind and howling sounds. Walking SFX was just him clapping or the Magistone "MMM" was his voice again but edited.  I had to make some choices to create specific music to create ambience. It was risky but I chose to have weird non-music type of effects in the background to make player feel a bit thrilling. This will be resulting in one of the reasons my score dropped.

After the SFX part, I had prepared a main menu and a pause menu. I had drawn a background which was resembling the safehouse that the engineer has to bring his daughter to and build atmosphere and game-culture around it. It turned out to be smooth and useful. However, the game was still unfinished. There were no dialogues, no story implemented and nothing to give hints.

First, I made a interscene to start the atmosphere because I didn't want to start the game out of no where. I tried to make a dialogue to skip without wasting my time googling, that's why I had a lot of issues dealing with dialogue and skipping it. As well as that, I had to manipulate the same script to use it for the in-world dialogues that would be appearing above the player, daughter and main points of interest to notify player.

Seventh Day:
          I did not sleep and I continued to work from previous day. I had my informative texts and their functions at first. It was all weird and buggy since I wanted the text to appear within a vicinity. Disappear after the interraction and give out the next information. This costed me a ton of time since I couldn't make a proper way of doing that. I tried to create some scripts for me to make the design easier. It was yes and no but still worked out. I had trouble dealing with the things I wanted to do but after spending more time I was able to notify the player with informative text below construction bases and points of interest.

I changed that the player wouldn't start with resources. Now, the player has to bring the daughter first and claim the magicores and talk to the magistone to claim another one. And, I realised that if the player never brings daughter to the house, there wouldn't be a daughter to hurt over there so I had to force the player bring the daughter first before time goes off and waves start to appear.  THAT resulted me dealing with more dialogues which i was already disgusted by it. 

After having the player bring the daughter to the safehouse and preparing dialogues I thought that to make the game a bit easier I would create a random wood dropper for player to collect. I thought that this would make the player go around more and experience the atmosphere during while panicing. Nevertheless, the game felt a bit still lacking and I was still not able to implement end game to reveal the truth. However, I had realise i didn't have much time to prepare an end game where the enemies revealed to be "police" or somewhat close to that. In fact, I thought it is going to result having my game not fitting the theme. ( Which is true.)

I have added a last minute of player hitting enemies to create more engagement which really didn't feel like it was working but I was getting too tired and lazy to keep developing mouse click hit. It was 09:30 in the morning and I decided to sleep for at least 2 hours. At 11:30, I started to work and realised some major bugs. I had tried to fix them and I did fix some of them. However, the fact that day resetting would end up with enemy waves getting broken or woodcutter can't be getting upgraded or even people sometimes would be facing wrong information text below construction bases and can't even use them to build... This was a total defeat for me. I couldn't deal more of it and had to submit the final version of the game since I submittied some prior version to try out WebGL built. 

Conclusion:
          After 2 weeks of waiting and engaging with other game developers and trying their game and them trying my games, I've realised that the rates are in fact had weird sides on them. I think there are biased thoughts or people expecting games to be more simple or more specific to their taste. However the major problem was lying in me. 

Deciding a bit complex game and trying to finish it within a week and trying to implement 3-4 mechanics combining with the theme was a harsh idea for a fresh developer for me. As well as that, I decided to produce everything from scratch which resulted in poor time management and THAT resulted me not finishing my game as intended to and bring major bugs that would fatally effect people's experience with my game. 

I've realised spending time on Audio and giving some care would not be as effective for high rating points since people's expectations were different. There are some games with audios taken from free sources and used but still resulting "better". I've some strong opinions about legitimacy of rates but this is how the gamejam is intended to be. Therefore, what i learned is that I had to make a choice whether or not pleasing myself or people. 

Tutorial however was the main issue. I was not able to implement a proper tutorial for people to be able to understand the mechanics and actually play the game. Which resulted in people not playing the game long enough to experience the real deal. Instead of giving a short and fast satisfaction and fun to frustrated game developers who tried a lot of different game, my game was a bit too much ( it would be also too much for me I guess) 

As well as that, there were main bugs and main issues. This would result wasting other people's time playing my game. If you can't understand the game because of incapability of me not introducing the game properly and if you can't play the game due to major bugs, then it's all on me and poor time management. I couldn't even make the game have the rogue-like element because of the bugs. Maybe if i was better at solving those two issues, I could at least expect a better result than now. 

In anyhow, I've experienced a great jam. I did things I wouldn't normally do and forced myself to achieve something. I am sure that I made something good. I know that I could be better and I appreciate the amount of time people played and tried my game. I wish I was better and I wish I was not wasting some people's time who tried it out and experienced major issues. 

Thank you for the GameJam and especially thanks to Brackeys for helping me without noticing!