Hey everyone! I wasn't really sure if I was going to write a devlog, but I realised it was probably a good idea to keep up motivation/accountability! I made a very rough outline of the concept in a bitsy game a few months ago, but I found bitsy to be way too constricting in terms of how I wanted to tell this story. So, I'm using this jam as an opportunity to completely overhaul it and force myself to learn some C# and basic Unity functionality along the way.

Concept/Story

Without going into too much detail, I've had the idea for this game for years, from when I studied ancient history at university. (However, of course all assets used in the game are just going to be those I made in the two-week slot!).

It's based on a priestess of Athena, who is mentioned on couple of inscriptions from ancient Athens (late 5th century BC, so around the 450s-420s). We know barely anything about her aside from her name, and that she looked after the temple of Athena Nike on the Athenian Acropolis (the famous bit in the centre of the city, where there's loads of temples and ancient buildings surviving to today). I wanted to take some creative liberties and write a game about her first year working as a priestess!

Game Design/Mechanics

I didn't want to over-complicate things for my first jam, so I wanted this to be a simple 2D side-scroller: the player explores parts of Athens as Myrrhine, talks to its citizens, and helps them out. In doing so, she earns enough 'kleos' (Ancient Greek for 'fame' or 'reputation', almost), to attract the attention of important citizens or residents. This will lead to a little 'boss-battle' with these figures, where Myrrhine either tries to defeat them or earn their respect.

So, I guess King's Quest/a typical Sierra game-meets-Wario Ware, almost? 

Limitations & Learning Goals

If I was to go further with the project, I'd want to have the year mapped out as four 'season' levels: summer, autumn, winter, spring. However, for this jam, I'll be extremely happy if I finish with even a very rough prototype of one level (summer).

I've never made a game in Unity before, aside from little prototypes that were part of the free Unity Junior Programmer course, so basically everything will be new! The main goals, however, are to make a little projectile game for my boss battle, and figure out how to make a dialogue system work between Unity and Inky (feel like this will be definitely the hardest part...).

Anyway, I will post a few screenshots from the past few days in a post below soon!

Day 1

Day 1 was just a lot of thinking/organising/making very basic place-holder assets to get the ball rolling, and I don't really have any screenshots. But that was when I decided to just limit the game to two stages: a walking around Athens stage, and then a mini-boss-battle. The idea for a boss battle is for Myrrhine to be invited to a dinner by an important Athenian, and while there, she's challenged to a game of kottabos. This was a real ancient Greek dinner game, where attendees try to hit a special lamp-stand by throwing wine out of a cup at it (!): the goal was to knock off a metal disc balanced at the top. But I thought it really lent itself to a super-simple projectile game which I could attempt to make in Unity.

Day 2

After deciding all of this, I made a *real* simple prototype of the kottabos game. (The wine is... meant to be that incredibly weird looking droplet/blob thing... which I am dying to fix so it doesn't look so horrible, but I don't want to waste too much time on aesthetics when I just need to get things working!). It took a full day to figure out the coding for this, even though I was basically working directly from YouTube tutorials and Unity Answers, but I learned a lot!

Basically, the player holds down the space key to 'charge up' throwing the wine, and the wine is thrown in the direction of the mouse cursor.

Day 3

Today was all about finishing off the basic kottabos game. I wanted to add a little gauge so the player could know how much they had 'charged' up their throw, which is the top bar in this gif. But, I wanted to add a little twist, so that it wasn't just a simple projectile shooting game: I wanted the player to be able to 'fill up' their glass (which I haven't drawn in yet, oops) with wine by holding down the 'E' key. This would add more mass to the... 'wine blob'..., so it's harder to throw further, and the 'fill' level would be visible with another gauge (the bottom one).

It was good to figure out how to change the mass of a prefab like this, and also figure out the UI involved in making the two bars. I also added a little score counter to the top, although I haven't coded in the game stopping after 3 throws. (Also need to play-test it more to see if they should have more attempts to hit the top of the lamp, etc etc...)

So, things left to do for the kottabos game: add the glass to Myrrhine's sprite, program the top part of the lamp-stand to fall down when it's hit, stop the game after 3 hits, and also fix up the boundaries for the wine blob so it doesn't just fly off the side of the screen. And obviously mess around with the amount of force applied to the wine/its maximum mass, so that it feels more realistic. Overall, though, I'm pretty happy that I managed to figure out how to scrape this all together so far!

Tomorrow, I'm taking a bit of a break from kottabos and working on figuring out Inky and a dialogue system. I think this is going to be a really big challenge, but if it's too much I'll just focus on polishing up the kottabos mini-game for the rest of the jam.

Day 3

... as suspected, trying to make a dialogue system is a *lot* of work. I spent most of today on this, but I *finally* have something... vaguely functional. Basically all I did was watch a bunch of YouTube tutorials and read a lot of Inky documentation, then made a complete hash of reworking and splicing together two example scripts (one from this tutorial, the other which was included with the Inky unity integration pack). The major sticking point for me was that all the lines of text were displaying on top of each other, like this:

... which I spent *ages* trying to figure out. Turns out I just had to turn a 'while' statement into an 'if' statement, and everything worked perfectly... hahaha... ah... ha....

This is what it looks like now, although here are still problems: biggest is that the dialogue manager is skipping over the lines in the middle of a sequence of sentences, until it hits sentence before a set of choices. Hence why none of that dialogue makes any sense! So, figuring why it's doing that is next on my list!

Anyway, I've spent so much time on the dialogue and the mini-game I've let a lot of other life-things pile up, so I need to go sort them out over the next few days. But, I hope things will significantly speed up when I do come back to it, since I think (I hope!) I've broken the back of the two major games mechanics I wanted to implement.

Day... uh, like, 8?

Phew, okay, life got really busy, but now I'm a bit more settled. I'm going to post a quick morning update before I have to head out, but I've *nearly* finished the basics of the dialogue system. I figured out why the dialogue manager was skipping over the sentences: basically, I think I'd doubled up on too many 'if' statements and created a kind of feedback loop which automated Unity running through the sentences until it hit a choice-barrier... I think! Anyway, whatever I changed worked, and here we are:

The last thing left is that the choice buttons: I couldn't understand why only one choice seemed to load out of each set. However, after looking in the inspector while the game was running, it turns out all the choices are loading in (yay!), but the buttons sit on top of each other and hide everything beneath the top one (boo). (Here's what it looks like when you set the 'top' choice to inactive - it completely covers the choice beneath it!)

So, figuring out how to offset the choices so that they all appear in a little textbox, or at least spread out so you can see all of them, is today's task! After that, I can start filling in the game properly, and we're on the home stretch.

Day 9 (I think...)

This is *not* pretty, but it's functional, at last(!!). Thanks to this tutorial and other videos on that channel, I finally have a bare-bones dialogue system.

So, the dialogue box is all mushed at the moment because I just threw it in without worrying about aspect ratio at the moment. Buuut when I do get time to do that, it'll be a little stele in itself, which is the name given to inscribed stones which were displayed around Athens, and on which Myrrhine's inscriptions can be found. I just wanted a nice little nod to the source material which was the inspiration for all of this!

Anyway, I didn't actually think I would get the dialogue system finished by the end of the jam, so I'm super pleased. Final task for it is to figure out how to destroy everything once I reach the end of the dialogue (maybe I can use tags or something from Inky...?). Then, I'll try and in-fill as much of the game as possible before Saturday, and hopefully have something to submit by Sunday!