Hello everyone! This is my first time doing #devtober!

I'm mainly going to be focused on improving my prototyping and finishing skills with the intent of having something playable and fun at the end of the month. I only have about an hour or two a day to work on side projects so I hope to be efficient and keep the scope small.

My secondary goal is to vet features on my custom game engine that I've been writing over the past few years in said spare time. 

For day 1 I've mostly been doing some pen and paper prototyping and going over some old ideas that I've had in the past. I haven't fully decided on anything yet and might sleep on it. In the meantime, I'm setting up the project specific code in my engine and getting some of the boiler plate out of the way. 

Good luck to everyone out there and I can't wait to see what everyone makes!

Day 2

I think I've decided on a direction for a small arena battler game. I started working on the main character from a wonderful asset pack I found here: https://itch.io/s/45421/minifantasy-complete-bundle

Setting up animations is quite cumbersome in my engine (as I don't have an animation editor yet) and took up the majority of my time to set up the main character's movement state along with the attacking animations. Hoping tomorrow will be more productive!

Day 3

Set up a basic enemy with some path finding / flocking / avoidance to seek the main character and avoid other enemies as best as possible. There still are some rough edges to it (jitter when they're all close) but I think it will work pretty good for now. I'm not sure what other kinds of avoidance I'll need so I'll move forward to some basic combat tomorrow!

Day 4

I started working on some basic combat hit/hurt boxes and changed the player facing direction to be based on the mouse position around the player character. 

I need to get proper animation states set up for the enemies as well as some better code for updating things that are alive / dead. The hit/hurt boxes definitely need some fine tuning as well.

Day 5

Hooked up a bunch of animations and states for the enemies.  Still need a lot of work on the combat feel and hit/hurt boxes as well as more states for the main character. Will continue to work on combat tomorrow and get some health and damage numbers going!

Day 6

Did not have a lot of time today but I managed to refactor some of the attack code to allow for different attack types in the future. I also added some damage numbers and a bit of code to help prevent characters from being hit by the same attack across multiple frames. Tomorrow I hope to set up some more animations and state for enemies spawning/dying as well as damage states for the player.

Day 7

Added some more states and animations for the enemies dying and spawning. Also added damage to the main character and a mini stuff when attacked. Next I'd like to try to add some more abilities to the main character and maybe start some of the gameplay loop of having enemies spawn/die/reset. 

Day 8

Started working on sorting the render queue in order to prepare for tile maps and Y based sorting. Also preparing my game specific editor to generate a base map.  Tomorrow I hope to generate and respawn enemies after the tile map code is done. 

Day 9

Hooked up the Y based sorting for the enemies and character as well as added some spawning logic for enemies outside the bounds of the camera. Didn't get much time on the tile map code but will get back at it tomorrow.

Day 10

Continued working on the tile map editor and imported some tiles for the map biome. Nothing terribly interesting today, just a lot of necessary work to make the tile map editor work.

Day 11

Took a break from the tile map editor and started added some more characters and refactoring some player controller code. I'm really starting to feel the pain of not having an animation tool for my engine and it's becoming rather cumbersome managing all the sprite frame animations.

Day 12

Did not have a lot of time today and continued the player character code refactor. Hope to have something to show tomorrow! 

Day 13 + 14

Unfortunately I've been sick the past few days and have not had the time nor gumption to work on side projects! 😭

Day 18

I am back and feeling alright. I added some party members to the team as well as some AI behaviors for seeking the player, enemies and attacking.