I've been taking a couple of courses on Unity, mostly about platformers, and figured it's time to create a game from scratch to get practice with the things I've been learning. My goal is to make a simple 5-level platformer that uses basic Unity features.  

Working with the "water" theme, I'm going with the idea of racing across a desert landscape. The player has got to reach the next oasis before he/she dies of dehydration. The last level will (hopefully) include some sort of boss challenge.

I'll use a simple public Trello board for keeping track of tasks and progress:
Oasis Racer Kanban

Random Thoughts...

• I'm hoping to draw pixel art with Aseprite, and create all the assets except for sounds.
• Possible obstacles: Cacti, Fire, Quicksand
• Possible enemies: Vultures, (some other desert animal, for some reason I'm stuck on Kangaroos)
• Maybe I'll add one new obstacle/enemy per level
• I'd like to add a health bar, filled with water, that decreases with time (representing dehydration). I've got no idea how to do this in Unity, but how hard can it be?

Interesting. I like this kind of "survival".

I don't know Unity, but health bar is a fairly common mechanic, I don't think you will have much trouble finding out how to do and  implementing it.

And if I may suggest: snakes could be good enemies in the desert too, with some sort of jumping behaviour. :D

Good luck!

I was just talking to my daughter about the game and she suggested snakes too. Snakes it is!

And I found a YouTube series about creating a health bar. I'm guessing I can modify that to work with a time-dependent health bar.

ohhh nice! i love that you've also linked your trello board! not sure how much you use trello or if you already know this but it would be cool to have some labels on your cards--something like high, mid, and low priority might help the viewer visually understand the level of your tasks and where you are with those. best of luck this jam!

That's a good idea for the Trello board, thanks much!

The board now has some High, Med, Low labels.

EDIT: I've got an idea for the hydration meter that came to me as I stared at the all white player prototype I made. What if the hydration meter was the player, something like this...

When the player is fully hydrated they are all blue, then they gradually turn white as they lose water. I was reading about sprite masks in Unity, and wonder if I could use something like that to get this to work.

I know I could do it by creating a series of sprites for each level of hydration (say 10 levels times about ten sprites for the animation stages), but that'd be a slog and not as elegant.

Day 1 Update

Yesterday I got the basics of player motion in place. This is probably the most comfortable spot for me in Unity, so I didn't expect any issues so far.

I've decided to try to get the dehydration mechanic working, so that'll be next. I'm going to try to break it down into three steps.

• Get a hydration bar working.
• Get a hydration bar working as a mask on a static player.
• Get a hydration bar working as a mask on an animated player. (I'll need to create the animated art first, so this might be tomorrow.)

Day 2 Update

I ended up with not as much time as I had hoped to work on things yesterday, but I did make some progress. 

• I've abandoned for the time being the idea of making the player into the hydration bar. I hacked away at it for about an hour and realized I was in way over my head with something that just isn't critical to gameplay. So to the options bin it goes.

• I'm leaning toward this musical score for a background track.

• I was able to spend some time with Aseprite creating the main character. I'm going for a durable survivor type feel to it. Also, I switch from 16x16 artwork to 32x32 artwork because I finally realized how limiting 16x16 is for characters. Here's a quick look at main character version 1.0:

Today I should have more time, so I'm hoping to get the running and jumping animation done. I'm using this drawing I found on the Internets as a base for an eight-step animation sequence:

Off we go!

Finally got player animation and movement done...

Next up:
• Camera movement
• Rock (obstacles)
• Jumping Cacti
• Background art
• Build out the first level

Day 4 Update

Garg. Total failure to work on this today. Super busy day of both work and family stuff left no time at all. Can’t afford many empty days if I want to finish something by the deadline.

The next three days look better, though. 

Good day so far. Got menus, saving, pausing, resuming, and the level selection system all working. Probably my least favorite part of the whole process, and now it's behind me. 

Time to start working on more levels!

Day 9 Update

Really big day today, but it's still not enough to finish in time.

• Main menu works
• Saving mechanism works
• Pause menu works
• Level Select mechanism works
• First tutorial level is complete.

Everything went pretty smoothly today, but it was a grind getting through this stuff. The UI stuff was probably my least favorite part of building this game so far. It does feel great to get it behind me, though, as only fun stuff remains.

The problem, however, is that I'm heading out of town on Friday afternoon and have work and family activities that fill up most the time right until I depart. So there just isn't the 8-10 hours I think I need to finish this.

My plan, however, will be to submit what I've got done. The tutorial first level works now, and I can probably get some of the second level done too. That'll have to do, and then I'll finish the rest of the game after the jam ends.

I'm not sure if anyone is still around, but I'm still grinding away at this for about an hour or so a day, and have made some good progress.

• Create fire (damages player)
• Created snakes (enemy, damages player)
• Created first aid kits (increases health)
• Created quicksand (stops player movement for a few seconds, needs improvement)
• Other minor gameplay modifications
• Completed Level 2 (fire and snakes)
• Squashed some bugs, created new bugs

I'm planning to create vultures next, then build Level 3 and 4.

Here's a screenshot from level 2...