Hey all, I did the last edition of this jam so I though I'd try it again and see how it goes this time. I started a little late (monday) but thing's have been going pretty smoothly I think.

Idea
Basically, my goal is to get going what's basically a procedurally generated link's awakening-like game. Pixel wise, the screen will be 160x144 (but able to scale up) and I'll probably get it to be the same green colour scheme. I've got a few ideas of how overworld/dungeon generation will go, but I'm not entirely sure yet. I'm not entirely sure what the game's about, but I chose death wanders because the little test sprite I came up with kinda looks like death and I like the idea of death just wandering around and doing stuff for kicks.

Language
I'm using lua with the Love2D framework.

Goals
Generate and interesting and coherent overworld that can connect to dungeons (subterranean and towers). Hopefully get different biome / area types and towns. Some basic AI and a few enemies to populate the world.

day 1 / 2 progress

- blocked out the game's basic file structure
- got a tilemap system down. moves between rooms. need to make a better transition animation
- extremely basic map generator that just makes a set of completely connected rooms
- simple player movement
- simple health system
- simple animation stuff blocked out
- tried to make some simple sprites for testing (I'm no artist...)
- thought long and hard about how map generation will go... I'm looking into perlin noise generation for the overworld. Maybe some cellular automata caves for underground or bsp dungeons.

day 3 goals
- look more into how to generate an interesting overworld.
- check what size the overworld is in link's awakening and see how it's structured
- make a better scrolling animation when moving between rooms / tilemap sections
- maybe make some simple enemies if there's time, but unlikely

Here's a video of what it looks like now (I rather like the silly skeleton walls). The bottom ui will hold items and stuff (just health right now)

Alright, for day 3 I did some stuff.

- made parts of the code cleaner so it's easier to work with
- got scrolling animation between rooms to work (although it's not perfect. scrolling the player is a little glitchy)
- started / planned out how enemies will work. All there is now is a little white rectangle dude that moves right every other second
- I decided to leave out random generation stuff till later since it makes more sense to get some working gameplay first

my day 4 goals are pretty much to get some enemies doing some more interesting stuff, get collisions between player/enemies working, give the player an attack and see how that all turns out. I also found some nice tilesets and sprite sheets on OpenGameArt so I might put those in (no more silly skeleton walls).

Also, as a side goal, I should figure out a good way to post gifs here... I need a good place to host them, I think.

Day 4

Not much of an update, I'm too tired to get a video or gif done, but there was some good progress.
- puzzled my way through some collision detection / resolution so now the player collides with enemies, get's pushed back, loses health
- honestly, that took a while. I really had to think about some of it, but I understand it much better than the last times I've tried.
- the enemies move around more, but they don't do much else.

day 5 goals

- give the player some sort of attack
- get enemy-enemy collisions and enemy-tilemap collisions working
- get better tilemap collisions working
- do some player animation
- maybe try and get a pause menu / game over screen working

I hope to get the core game stuff done by saturday or sunday so I can spend the whole last week working on world generation.

Day 5
Things are somewhat on track.
- gave the player an attack (the little white rectangle) and the enemy will lose health / die
- tilemap collisions are improved, but not quite where I want them
- as usual, I got sidetracked improving stuff to make it better (there were some pretty useful changes made)
- added a bunch of visual debug stuff that can be turned on / off (forgot to show that in the video)

Day 6 goals
- I know I'll be too busy this weekend, so pretty much if I do anything I missed on an earlier day then I'll be happy.

Forgot to post yesterday, but here's where it is now

Day 6/7 progress
- the big one is cave generation. can now generate a simple cave to wander around
- the player starts in a random spot and enemies are generated on empty tiles
- I've been collapsing the enemies and player's stuff into 1 base type, so that's been a lot of time. It's made (and continues to make) things a lot simpler.
- because of that, I've got enemies bouncing back after being hit, and detecting walls (most of the time)
- also added a game over state and a pause state

day 7 goals
- finally clean up the visuals. I did the setup for it today, just need to use it
- cleanup / improve the cave generation
- add floors maybe?
- add a map sometime