Day 1:
I had no ideas on what to do for the Holes. I have done quite a few game jams over the years and always found that themes that are just one nouns (e.g. Chairs or... Holes) make for terrible themes as everyone ends up making a game completely unrelated then shoves the theme in at the end (I did a jam with the theme Chairs once and 90% of the games where just shooter games with animated chairs for enemies) .
So I wanted to make the concept of Holes ( "a hollow place in a solid body or surface" verb: "make a hole or holes in") the core of my entire game, so I needed to able to dig, which means deformable terrain!
I started by creating a large cube-shaped terrain using a marching-cubes algorithm. This way I could effect the weighting of each node to deform the mesh! I finished off the day but adding in some low poly water and an basic FPS controller!
https://twitter.com/VexedDeveloper/status/1229173822831648768
Day 2:
Back at work for the week so working on this had to wait till the evening. After showing my project to some of the guys at work I decided that the Island theme wouldn't work. It would take a lot of work to get the island to nicely merge with the surrounding water and I don't think I would have time to work out all the mechanics to how water would react when digging around it. So change of plans!
The new idea is a game set in space with lots of planets you can fly between!
So first I changed my marching cube code to support multiple separate bodies and then changed how the initial weighting of the nodes where calculated to form spheres! I then changed the FPS controller to use a custom gravity vector and rotate the player based on this new gravity. Next I added in a basic "jetpack" mechanic you could use to jump between planets, your gravity vector is decided based on the closest planet!
Each planet has a solid core you can walk around (might make this in to some kind of mechanic or resource) that stops the character from reaching the centre of gravity and spazzing out!
https://twitter.com/VexedDeveloper/status/1229553923293351938
Day 3:
Not too much to show for day three.
I added some noise to the planet surfaces to make it feel more organic. I did this bu simply altering the radius of the sphere at each node for the marching cube algorithm based on a generic noise calculation. I then started messing around with a way to limit the digging ability, currently I am going with a suction gun which will suck up the resources from the surface you are digging!
https://twitter.com/VexedDeveloper/status/1229922404660654082
Day 4:
Over half way through now and I have realised I have no idea what kind of game I want to make and I just have a cool digging mechanic! So while I think about what to turn this into I have spent some time optimising the mesh deformation, working on movement and trying to make unique visuals!
https://twitter.com/VexedDeveloper/status/1230253003199909888
Day 5: Looking at how I can add some kind of weapon / combat! Started to prototype a weapon that is charged by mining the surface around you which it then compresses and fires!
https://twitter.com/VexedDeveloper/status/1230629914438750208