Hello there, I'm Guessy, and for the Jam I'm going to make a run at building a turn-based tactics game in two weeks. Because I make excellent life decisions.

I'm a solo Unity dev who's tried to dabble in TRPGs in the past but fallen short due to over-engineering the map system; spending months working on ingame editors and all sorts of faff instead of the actual game to the point I ran dry of all motivation and steam. Here I... made a 'gameplay cell' prefab, copied it about a bunch and brute-forced neighbour detection with an editor script and physics queries. I wrote it in an afternoon.

...Game jams, right?

Anyway, my actual dev log is elsewhere, but I'll still dump images and guff in here. WITNESS, THE MAGIC OF PINK CUBES:

Wish me luck!

Progress continues! Attack orders are in, now for round/turn structure and a very, very basic enemy AI. Once there's a game you can actually win/lose, I'll start digging into the meat of characters, units and animations.

So after getting turn/round structure and basic AI working, I added a basic menu and figured 'hey, now is a good time to do a test build' and HOO BOY-

So er. It turns out Unity has some less than well documented differences between release builds and development builds. In adding a main menu, I also added the ability to start/restart the game, aka 'unload/reload the main scene', which caused a whole bunch of other bugs thanks to me forgetting to unhook destroyed objects from static events.

In short I've fixed everything as best as I can find and the game should work, but there may be crash-bugs and if anyone is willing to give the alpha build a test-run I would greatly appreciate it.

Alpha 3 is up on the project page, featuring the first MG (finally) and the unique mechanic of the game: the Interrupt System!

When a unit is attacked - yours or theirs - they have the opportunity to respond; spend Action Points to Evade (literally dodge into a nearby tile) or Tank the hit (lose HP, but save AP for the following turn). In this sense, it becomes a game of teamwork to bring your opponents down; a magical girl with a flashy boss-killer attack isn't going to do much good if her team can't pin it down first. On the flipside, if she gets attacked whilst still charging that anti-boss move, her team-mate with a towershield can intercept it by literally swapping their positions.

...Not that I've actually implemented those two characters yet, but I'm hoping to get those done in the time remaining. Getting the Interruption System functioning was a bit of a slog and took longer than expected to implement, on the player-side more than for the AI, weirdly enough.

Anyway, onto the characters! The first MG to make it into the game, designed by the talented CornyBones over at Sufficient Velocity: Talga!

She fits the 'Attacker' role in the MG squad: she has a decent melee attack and good movement, letting her go where she's needed to keep pressure off of the specialists, but she doesn't have much in the way of defence on her own, so don't get her overwhelmed.

Last MG is in the game. Final stretch now, folks.

Aaaaand she's up!

...and I am going to pass out because it's 1am.

Any major crashbugs I may hopefully wake up in time to try and tackle them, but no promises.

Pew pew gets old never