DAY 1

Hello my name is Oliver and I participated in Devtober for the first time last year. I made a game called Holly which is right here https://olivergallina.itch.io/holly and I'm proud of it despite how average it is. THIS year I come to you with a year's worth of additional experience.  Does this mean I'll be able to make a better game for Devtober? Woah haha hold it there buddy let's not get too spicy too early in the month here haha gaming. Actually on this particular Day 1 I have no idea what game I want to make, and I'm currently developing a different game (which is actually going to be done very soon), and I'm in my senior year of college and thus very busy. Given all this I'm betting this Devtober will be a lot harder for me to commit to than it was last year (and sheesh, it was already really hard last year), though dangit homie I just can't stop myself from joining jams and trying to make games because it's just so  fun. 

I'm basically considering my "progress" for today as just writing this post, though actually now that I think about it I might write some of my ideas for my Devtober game here (feel free to steal them if you want!!), just to put em out there; also I have no idea what type of game I want to make so some ideation would be pretty gucci gang 100 emoji I believe. Also this is probably just gonna be word vomit; it's more for my use than it is for anyone reading it. Though maybe it'll be entertaining idk. Here's a list of ideas:

- Kite flying action game where you drag a kite behind you and have to control it with some level of precision and guide it into Good Stuff (TM) and away from Bad Stuff (TM) while the kite follows your movement, though in a lazy kite sort of way.

- Choose your own adventure game w/ real life footage (like an FMV game or whatever) and the footage consists of me doing stupid stuff in my apartment

- Sequel to my amazing (read: very bad) game MEGA PUNCH BALL where you punch a ball in a physics-y manner through a pinball course, or a dungeon or something

- Arcade-style game about juggling

- Whack-a-mole but from a 3rd person perspective where you manually run around to each hole and there's like idk fun abilities or some twist to it or whatever

- Ice skating game

DAY 2

WELL first of all I'd like to mention that today I got a great deal of work done on the other game I'm working on which will be done very soon, which I mentioned in the Day 1 post, so THAT's great. There's a super secret screenshot of one part of the game at the bottom of this post (don't tell nobody). 

As for the game I'd like to make for Devtober, I'm still just kinda thinking it over. I think I want to go for some kind of arcadey, small experience with just a solid gameplay core to it; I don't want to write a narrative, or have to build out a bunch of content / levels in order to fully flesh out the game. I just want one level / room / screen / whatever in which a real gamey video games type video game plays out. So with  that in mind, I think, out of the ideas I wrote down yesterday, I'm leaning strongest towards the 1st idea or the second to last idea. Maybe tomorrow I'll try and write down some more details for both of those ideas and see which one I end up liking the most, and then proceeding from there. 

So that's about it fo today, I'm just kinda chillin through this year's Devtober, not feeling any particular pressure to make one thing or another. I'm glad about this, since last year when I made Holly I talked a lot in my Development Logs about how I really felt like I had to make some super dope portfolio piece, which kinda messed with my mindset and motivation while working on the game. Right now in comparison feels much more relaxed, and I'm just flowin with the flow with the go with the go flow yeahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. Aight thanks for reading this good night.

DAY 3

WHOOPS I did something today but I almost forgot to post about it. I just drew a little idea scenario of what the game might look like (probably gonna be goin with the kite game). I’m thinking about doing it in Unity since I’ve been working in Unreal a lot recently. And yeah that’s it for today I’m bout to go to bed so GOOD NIGHT.

DAY 4

Woah I actually got something substantial done on this game today. I got a very basic form of kite flying working in Unity; I haven't programmed anything similar to this before so I'm just kinda estimated guessing at what might be a good way to implement these systems, and using tutorial videos that cover similar topics. I'm very happy with this, though, considering it was only about an hour's worth of work; here's a video of it. The sprites I'm using are just some ones I have laying around; they won't be in the final game. I have a script on the kite that checks if its X position is lesser or greater than the player's, and then it adds a force in a direction towards the player. I'm not sure exactly how deep I want to make the kite's movement (or how deep I'm *able* to make it lol), though I know the main aspects I want are for the player / kite movement to 1) Feel frictive and good and fun, and 2) Be predictable, since this will be a sort of "fast action" game where you'll want your kite to behave consistently so that you can manipulate it skillfully. Just based on this first implementation I'm already feeling excited about this.

It looks promising. I'm curious to see what happens next.

DAY 5

Oh man this kite's gettin pretty cool yall. Today I implemented a sort of "catch up" mechanic where, when the distance between you and the kite exceeds a certain amount, the kite will move faster than normal towards you. In effect this gives the kite a more intuitive feel; if you're just walking in front of a kite it'll sorta trail behind you slowly, though if you start sprinting with it it'll move with you more aggressively. You'll be able to see it clearly in the video I've posted; the kite (well the weird pumpkin thing right now) turns red when it starts catching up, just for visual clarity / debugging in this early phase. I also improved the player's movement a bit since it was being calculated in kind of a stupid way before, because I hadn't used Unity in a while and I forgot how to do things properly. Also got some walls in there for that one screen action. Very happy with this, especially since I consider myself to be REALLY stupid when it comes to programming very minute game movement mechanics that require intricate little bits and pieces in order to make them really feel good to the player on an intuitive level. 

I think next I'll probably clean up some of the code I've written already, maybe polish up player movement / input stuff in the process (it gets weird when you press both Left and Right at the same time, for example), or I'll try and put some more mechanics in here like obstacles or whatever. 

DAY 6 

Today I was extremely busy with a bunch of other stuff so I only spent like 20 minutes on this, though it was a good 20 minutes. I just cleaned up some of the player's movement code, and fixed the weird behavior when you press both Left and Right keys at once (so now the player stops when you press both at once, instead of veering off in one direction and not stopping until you let go of both keys). So that's good; always good to have the movement system be as tight and responsive as possible in a game like this (or a game like I want this game to be).

DAY 7

Today I almost opened Unity and then I was like "wait what should I even do in-engine right now anyway." SO instead I wrote a whole page of ideas and questions about the design of this game (let's call it Action Kite for now)  (really wishing itch.io would put in a feature that let me change the name of the "Topic" for this development log, since "Some Kind of a Video Game" is too vague at this point but whateva). I got a buncha good stuff to go through here, lots of interesting design questions to answer. So I'll just be thinking about that stuff for the next bit here, to make this game into a real gamey gamer game. I'm excited about the foundation of it so just gotta find a good way to build on top of it. Thanks for reading this.

DAY 8 AND 9

I didn't post yesterday because I was real busy and then AFTER all that busy-ness I went out to see the new James Bond movie (which was really good), SO let's just say the progress for yesterday was research done by watching Daniel Craig do cool stuff. As for today I'm going to be traveling in just a few hours, and I got some other stuff to do before then, so let's just say pre-emptively that my progress for today will consist of thinking up & writing down some more ideas for the game, and maybe setting up the project on my other computer once I'm done traveling. You can just go ahead and trust that I'll be doing that stuff today because I keep it 100 emoji thirty thousand hundred million. So that's it for today and yesterday thanks for comin in.

DAY 12

Well the past few days I was in a state of either being really busy or really lazy, so I missed Days 10 and 11, but anyway today I made some form of progress. I just sat down and researched single-screen arcade games, and any kite flying games out there (there aren't that many, as gamer fate would have it). I'll continue to look at some of those games as references while working on this game. The good news is: there isn't really any other game that exists that's quite like the one I'm making. The bad news is: there are no games exactly like the one I'm making, so reference material can only get me so far. We're gonna be in for some solid iteration, Jerry. Thank you for reading this anda goodaaaa nighhhttttaaaaaaaaaaaaaa.

DAY 13

HOOOO you know when you get out the gym and you're like dang that was a good workout well that's me right now hooo hohohooooo I have put Wind Currents (which can push the kite up or down) and Projectiles (which destroy the kite upon collision ((not shown in the video but trust me it works lol))) INTO the game. Once the kite exits a wind current it'll start floating back to its original height, no longer being blown about by the wind and all. 

I'm trying to figure out the exact shape the game will take in the end, and I figured rather than do more research I should just get in and do some "rapid prototyping" (or whatever you want to call it) and see what works. THOUGH I am fairly certain that these wind currents and projectiles will be big parts of the final game, since I just see them as inherent to the idea of a kite based action game (i.e. you move a kite around so that you can make it dodge away from bad stuff, and also kites move up and down with the wind so wind currents make sense as well). 

Also, on a related note, this Devtober project is making me feel bad about the other project I'm working on (which I've been working on for several months and is very close to completion as I mentioned before). With every game I've worked on, whether it turned out to be good or not, I've gained valuable experience from the process which I've been able to apply to the next game. With this recent months-long game project I've gained a heck of a lot of experience in many different areas, and so now near the end of the project, I've uncomfortably noticed many ways in which the game could be improved. So this Action Kite game is a game I've started where I'm several months worth of game development better than I was before, while I'm also still putting the finishing touches on that bigger project, and basically what I'm trying to say is it feels weird and makes me think that the big project I'm finishing has been a waste of time (which I know it's not, but my brain is dumb). Anyway I just wanted to write about that in case anyone else has felt something similar; thanks for reading this post G.

DAY 14

Aight just a bit of progress today. I prototyped a platform that the kite can collide with, in case I want to have some form of level geometry that you have to navigate around in the game. I also added a level-reset-upon-key-press feature just for testing purposes. So basically just continuing to prototype and see what sticks and all that.

DAY 15

Today I prototyped another thing I'm pretty sure will be in the final game, the "SHINY GOOD POINTS BALL" which is a nice good object that you want to guide your kite into, while of course also guiding your kite away from the bad spikey no good projectile balls. Except right now it's the same placeholder pumpkin sprite tinted green but I know you know that it's all good we all good right now. Oh I also got a lil UI thing in there that displays the amount of shiny good points balls you've collected, since I figure this game will probably end up with a sort of arcadey get-the-high-score focus to it as I've mentioned. Also you can see in the video, those platforms I made yesterday are a bit annoying to maneuver around; currently thinking the full game won't have them, unless they're heavily modified or placed very carefully (the benefits of prototyping, am I right fellas?) (I'm right).

DAY 17

Ok not much of an update today because I’ve been busy being busy the past 2 days BUT I will say today I happened to have a small amount of philosophizing time while driving on the highway in which I realized a Potentially Real Good direction for this game to go in, and I’ve gathered some reference material (read: googled some video games) that I believe will help with this. I ain’t gonna spoil it right now though I’ll probably spoil it later THANK you for reading this.

DAY 18

Today was a full day of doing other things BUT I did make sure to make some backups of the project and put some copies on relevant drives and storage thingies as I will be traveling again tomorrow back to a location with a different computer which I will need to have the latest build on of course. So bada bing basically.

DAY 19

In the stunning sequel to yesterday, today I executed the aforementioned traveling and then proceeded to do school related things the whole day, BUT I did successfully carry the top secret project files for Action Kite TM onto my other computer, so now I can continue working on it and NOBODY can stop me

DAY 20

Okay SO today I implemented a camera that follows the player as they move side to side. The plan with this is to expand the game's stage horizontally; so basically this game might not be a single screen action game any more, but rather a single stage action game, if my hypothesis is correct. And that HYPOTHESIS is that this game *might* be more fun if the camera scrolled side to side, so as to better give you the feeling of running freely for long periods of time while dragging a kite behind you. It's harder to achieve that feeling if all the action takes place just inside a single box, is what I'm thinking. But anyway it's something I'm still just messing with; it wasn't hard to implement so I figured I should try it. 

DAY 21

Today I did some solid playtesting / messing around with the camera scrolling I made yesterday, along with some adjustments of the camera's size, the player's speed, and the default height of the kite. I also FOUND a game that I thought of the other day but couldn't remember the name of but knew it could be relevant to this game, 1980's Defender. That game is very cool and could serve as useful research. ALSO I went ahead and quickly made some first pixel art for the kite; I gotta say he's a handsome fellow.

DAY 22

Had like no time today so I uhhh made some potential art for the projectiles in the game in like 5 minutes. It's supposed to be a shuriken but the shape is kinda weird right now but anyway good night I am tired.

DAY 24

Aight the bulk of today's work (which wasn't a ton of time, maybe 20 minutes) consisted of messing around with additional control / input options for the kite; I want to see how it feels if you're allowed to just press Up / Down to move the kite up and down rather than having to move it onto a wind current, since I feel like that might make dodging certain projectiles smoother. However it doesn't quite work right now because I'm extremely tired and my brain is at like 10% lol. But yeah also wow it's October 24 already. By the time Devtober ends this will almost certainly just be a demo that I release (or don't release, idk it depends), and continue to work on it from there. Either way despite the massive amounts of stuff I'm doing outside of this jam, I'm very happy with the work I've done so far on ACTION KITE (working title).

DAY 25

OKAY I got the vertical Kite inputs working now. You can now move the kite up and down by pressing the Up and Down arrow keys, and I gotta say, I'm thinkin' it's feelin pretty nice. Also got that art I made put in the engine but I did that a few days ago and just didn't post about it.  Also been messing around again with player & kite & camera values to try to get something that feels right and shows a proper view of the action. I've been enjoying this whole process of throwing stuff into the game and seeing what sticks and what doesn't; ultimately I've made some pretty good progress this way and I'm looking forward to hopefully making this a full game eventually.

DAY 26

Didn't have much time today so I just kinda sat down with the project and reckoned with the thing I have created. Running around and flying this kite all carefree-like is pretty fun and like, breezy. I built out the current test scene to give it some more horizontal length, to see if I could capture a feeling of running through a large field with a kite flying behind you, and ngl it felt somewhat like that. So now basically I'm wondering if I should turn this into a more casual game or something, instead of a fast-paced arcade action game like I had originally intended. Maybe this is a case of "listening to the game" and what type of experience it provides whether the designer(s) intended it or not, or maybe I'm dumb. ANYWAY it's interesting to think about. 

DAY 28

Today I made a ProjectileSpawner which just spawns projectiles at its position every X second interval; pretty simple but useful thing if I want projectiles to be flying all over the screen constantly. I figure it'll be time for me to put this out as some sort of demo, or something, in the next few days when Devtober ends so adding some elements that make it feel a bit more like a game with a win/lose state is probably gonna be the biggest help with that.

(I had a screenshot of the spawner here but itch.io straight up isn't letting me post it and I have no idea why so just pretend a really cool new game mechanic screenshot is right here instead of this text)

DAY 30

Today I tried to get enough work done to make the game feel like a complete prototype that I'd be comfortable with putting up on itch and labeling it as In Development, and I do believe I achieved most, if not all, of that. I tuned the Projectile Spawners a bit, added some UI for Game Overs, moved physics-related Kite code over to FixedUpdate instead of Update (I know that should've been done from the beginning; I'm lazy), made a little 2-frame animated character (his name is Kiteman) to replace the placeholder character I had, and extended the level horizontally a bit more + made it look slightly prettier. 

Here's a video of all that! Very happy with getting all this done today since I know I'll have far less time tomorrow and Sunday.

POSTMORTEM

WOO wow it's so weird that it's already been a month. I literally just decided to do Devtober again this year on a whim with no idea of what type of game I wanted to make for the first several days, and I ended up with a pretty satisfying prototype. I think I'll just make a basic list of what went right / wrong / etc. like most other postmortems seem to be doing.

Good Stuff

- I took a good amount of time at the beginning of the jam to figure out what type of game I both wanted to make and thought I would be able to make without too much trouble. The intersection of these two things was very important imo.

- I managed to get the core mechanic (moving a kite around) feeling fun very early on; I'd call this a sort of snowball effect resulting from the good thing I mentioned above.

- Programming in general wasn't too complicated aside from the kite, which let me prototype and test different mechanics out pretty easily and quickly (again, snowball resulting from the "being able to make it without too much trouble" pre-planning)

- I like Kiteman he is a good character that I made

Not Good Stuff

Honestly there's not much I can think to write here. I wish I had more free time to work on this, I guess. Maybe I can think of a few more bullet points hmmmm.

- I expected to have a more complete game by the end of this. I'd attribute most of this to time constraints, though also there was a bit of frustration when it came to trying to conceive of and implement mechanics in the game that made it feel complete (I think a lot of this is because this is a pretty unique game that's hard to find references for); like right now, the Prototype is fairly basic, with just the regular kite movement + points that you can collect + projectiles to dodge. Granted, I think it's still pretty fun as it is, though I definitely think there could be more, somewhere somehow. However I did decide that just making some kind of finished thing and releasing it as a Prototype would be a good idea so I could get feedback, and so I could just use the Prototype as a base to build off of and hopefully make a full game out of it eventually.

Closing Thoughts and Things

This whole jam I've been thinking about how much better at game development I've gotten since last year. If you played my Devtober 2020 entry HOLLY, you'd know that it uhhh wasn't very good (I still think the dialogue is pretty good though). The whole past year I've worked on so many different projects and slowly improved in so many different game development related skills, and I think it shows pretty well in Action Kite, at least to some degree. This jam, I think, has reinforced for me the value of sticking with something you want to be good at and just not stopping (I mean though you should definitely take breaks know what I'm sayin haha heyyyyy); you'll almost certainly become objectively better at that thing over time if you just keep doing it. It's hard to gauge your progress sometimes, though every once in a while you do something you've done before, but you do it way better almost automatically and you gotta blink for a second and be like yo hol up I didn't realize I gained a SUPER power at some point dawg what in the blazing blue blazes, homie. So because of this I'm very glad I participated in Devtober this year. Also you can play Action Kite's prototype here wow! https://olivergallina.itch.io/action-kite-prototype