Day One  & Day Two... 

I am working on a game a that so far is about a mad scientist who has spent his life creating killer robots, and challenges you to defeat them, every 30 seconds to 1 minute he updates the code changing the attacks (going on with the theme of change). Its gonna be a bullet hell and the player has to survive as long as possible. 

On day 1, I worked mainly on the idea of the game and the battle arena.  

Today (day 2), I worked on a simple camera, placeholder character and enemy. My main focus (and one of the goals of the Jam) was to learn simple Inverse Kinematics. 

See my progress on my twitter https://twitter.com/mikepartlife

Mike

Day 3 & 4

Day 3 - I worked on getting the inverse kinematics working in all directions by connecting each leg to a foot. I then gave the foot a target area (a circle) to stay within, if the collision check is false then set the foot back to the middle of the target. Using a circle means that the enemies IK will work in every direction.  I have also started on enemy projectiles (no collision yet). 

Day 4 - Today I worked on the opening cut-scene, where the protagonist and the robot scientist meet for the first time. 

Short term future goals, create the playable character and add player health, bullet collision and a player attack. 

Turned on the visibility of the targets for a further demonstration of the IK in action. You can see the effect of when the foot leaves the target area it resets to the middle of the target area.

Day 5 - Today I created the playable character and his weapon, a bloody big sword. 

Not too much to report on, apart from further ideas about the gameplay. 

Today, I thought about the fact that this game at the moment is basically just a boss battle, and I want to add progression to the game. I don't know if expanding the scope will be a good idea at this stage and i might change my mind again. But I am thinking about creating 1 to 3 dungeons before the boss battle, to give the player some time to learn the mechanics and get good before battling the boss.

Any advise or ideas are welcome. 

Day 6 - Created the Dungeon generator, using a pixel sprite to plot out the placement of object, currently only for walls/collision, but eventually will include enemy spawns and entrance/exit to the room. 

The first prototype with placeholder art. After getting the idea down i spent today creating two new tile sets, one for the walls and one for the floor.

Here is the final dungeon tile-set...

I also created a player health bar and bullet collisions leading to depleting health.

Next steps:

- enemy sprites, AI movement & collisions

- larger rooms

- a new mechanic that the players weapon changes after each attack, to tie in to the theme of the Jam. 

neato, it looks good already

Day 8 - I took a day off Day 7 and went for a walk instead. But today, I created enemies that roam towards the player and more excitingly, more rooms with transitions between them. 

Not a whole lot to report apart from that, however future goals are creating locked rooms until they are cleared then progress finally the boss room. I will implement the player attack with the mechanic that after every successful hit the weapon swaps out. 

I think I will have to pull out the story aspect of the game as creating more cutscenes will take up a considerable amount of time, that will be better spent on UI and menu functionality. 

Been a couple of days since i've posted. But I have made a bit of progress. Added a weapon system and UI to show what weapon  is selected. However, you can not manually change the weapons, instead every time you hit an enemy with a bullet, the weapon changes to a bomb. You then have to place the bomb to resume shooting. The bomb has a spiral bullet pattern which can hurt you as well as the enemies. This is a bit of a strange mechanic but i feel it keeps the player moving round the room and makes it a bit more interesting.

I also finalised the room locking so you can only move to the next room once it is cleared. 

I think the next thing i will work on is going back to the boss battle and implementing 3 stages of that. When you get to the boss battle the players health will replenish.   

If I get time I will work on a menu UI and finally audio but i have a feeling that I wont be able to implement audio by the end of the jam. 

Final Day: 

Start Screen is now complete and I also added a custom cursor. 

I have also completed the Boss battle, and it is now complete and utter madness, but it is done. The progression through the dungeons is complete and when you die fighting the boss you restart the battle again, rather than going back to the start of the dungeons. 

I have had to miss out of creating any audio for the game, which is a shame, but im amazing in my self that i managed to create a full playable game even if it is relatively short. I'm happy with my achievement. 

I will post the game in my Itch page and write back here once it is up!