Hi guys, this is the first jam that I joined. The game that I'll be making is called Pavlov's House and is based on story from WW2, here's a Wikipedia link if anyones interested.

As for the mechanics it will be kinda like a mashup between tower defense and survival games, where enemies will come at you from all sides in waves and you will have to defend against them while managing your limited resources.

Goals for this jam:

• Implement one level with waves and only one kind of soldier & enemy
• Implement basic resource management (ammo, food, water)
• Have fun and maybe meet someone :D

I'll be working on this game even after the jam ends but those are the things I plan to finish for the jam.

Day 1

Since I forgot to post yesterday's progress I'll do it now.

Things I got working:

• a simple tileset
• friendly units and enemies, they can shoot each other but not their own
• health & healthbars, damage, death on zero health

Things I'm working on today:

• weapon range (so you don't have a guy with a pistol snipping you from the other side of the map XD)
• some basic enemy ai (like go towards nearest enemy if nobody is in range)
• placing friendly units
• and maybe enemies spawning in waves

Btw, I'm working in Godot and find the Top-Down Tank game tutorial on youtube to be rather useful for making this game.

Here we go Day 3.

Today I'm going to try to do some pixel art, mainly tiles and objects in the environment, and just going to say that I have no idea what I'm doing. XD

So if anyone has some suggestions, recommendations or any articles or tutorials that they found helpful, I'd appreciate it if you shared some with me.

P.S. Since I got a good grip on the programming side of things, my goal is to try to get better at making art for games, That's why I'm delaying having to use free assets from Internet as much as possible.

Day 3 - Update 1/2

Almost forgot to post what I have done. These are the current assets that I have in use:

Well as for the last few hours I've been thinking about how to do path-finding, so thats what Update 2 is going to be about.

Day 3 and Day 4

I wanted to post an update in here about my progress with pathfinding, but it is one hard nut to crack. I was able implement a functional system but it's still rough in the edges. Here are some gifs of how it works.

P.S.

I didn't actually implement walls and such so just pretend that you don't see bullets going over those concrete blocks. :P
Also should I do walls that are like in those gifs (similar to games like RimWorld) or maybe do 2.5D walls, something like this (btw the picture isn't mine):

For day 5 I'll do some world building, mainly placing down buildings and streets. If there is enough time then I'll start work on the resource system. Only later on in development process will the pathfinding system be revisited.

Day 5

I wasn't able to put much hour into working on the game today, but I made some progress on making the game map and I'm trying to make it as similar to the actual location where the story took place as possible.

Day 6

What I did:

• I reworked the UI
• Added some infrastructure code in the background for resources, their consumption, day cycle
• Desaturated dirt and grass sprites and removed some of the noise from them

What I plan to do next (although I might be too busy tomorrow to do it):

• Work on player units
  • Make them selectable
  • Allow to change equipment
  • Allow to relocate the unit in game
• Add resources on the map that can be "scavenged", etc. supplies hidden in other building, or lying near dead enemy soldiers
• Add more equipment, right now there is only the pistol available
• Maybe work a bit on the player AI (things like target a certain type of unit)
• And some time later begin work on vehicles (for starters a transportation truck and something armored)

Day 10

Yeah I kind of forgot to post for day 10, but I didn't do much anyway, just some contemplation about the game music. I'm think of having two soundtracks one for during battles and the for other situations. There will at least be a battle soundtrack, and I really wanted to use some action-pumped music, but then again, this is a kind of game where you hold out in a fort and enemies come charging at you, so maybe I'll later make an action game that will get your blood boiling from adrenaline.

Day 11

And here is today's update. I worked on:

• UI
• Pathfinding

First I thought some more about music, looking through all kinds of tracks online, and I'm also having someone help me with making the music (well they're doing the making part, I'm just listening to it).

Then sometime later I started cracking on the UI. Making one of those is really a nightmare, stuff just doesn't do what you tell it to, for some reason there's that weird 6 pixel margin on the left side of screen that I cannot get rid of and adding new parts is really tiring. Then after deciding to watch a tutorial and it seemed like it made sense now, everything was working as intended, that pesky margin was gone. But then I clicked on the maximize window button and everything broke apart. I looked for some tutorials about this and tried following them. Nope, still broken.

.

.

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Lets turn that off for now, I'll return to it ... someday.

Anyway after the UI, I went to work on pathfinding and that went well, I used the AStar node that Godot has and made a script that automatically scans the tilemap and picks tiles that are walkable and makes a graph, and now I can get a good path between any two points on the map, as long as the path exists.

I would give you guys a screenshot of how this works, but since I changed the input that goes into the script that control unit movement, it's now broken. (T_T)

That's all for today.

P.S.  I added raycast tests so that units don't try to shoot through walls.

Day 12

Damn three more days till the end, time to start panicking.

As for today, after rewriting most of the functionality for units movement with pathfinding seems to be working now. Here that gif that I promised.

This was the last mechanic that I planed to include for the duration of the jam, except for including objects like that box in the middle of the building into pathfinding calculations, who knows I might fix this before the jam ends, if not then you'll just have to pretend that it's normal to walk through an object until I fix it post-jam.

Now the next things to work on are:

• Level Design
  • Spawn points
  • Placing items around
  • Placing objects around (tables, chairs, beds, etc.)
• More Items
• More Guns
• Music
• Main Menu and/or Title Screen
• Game Over Screen
• Some kind of tutorial or intro
• Maybe some sprites for units

You've done some great work here! Way to be steady with the effort. It's really paying off. I look forward to giving it a go!

Day 13

Wow, it's getting tight with time. Plus having stuff IRL isn't helping.

Today I did:

• Some things I had to finish with the unit scripts
• A basic:
  • Main Menu (with some intro text)
  • Game Over Screen (now you can lose when you run out of supplies)
  • End of Day Screen
• Miscellaneous background code
• Pause functionality

Also I got some nice music made by mbg180, here's a link if you want to check it out:

• https://soundcloud.com/mbg180/not-one-step-back
• https://soundcloud.com/mbg180/bloody-sunday

Final Update

I submitted the game. I didn't take it as far as I intended, there is still a lot to add, but I learned a lot of things and lots of fun making the game and meeting other jammers, you're great guys.

For now I'll be taking a short break from game dev, I'll probably start playing games others have submitted.

I'll still be working on developing this game just not immediately.