Hi! I want to share about my game concept so far. Any comments that you have is very welcome! :)

Inspiration:

I'm participating in the jam because I want to challenge me to make a game based on the time and theme of the jam. I started to think what could be a fun concept to take and develop from that.

So, I started to look for some free resources for some inspiration. I found a post on the Jam's forum from @maxparata offering some free resources. But one of the assets took my attention! it was a plane voxel pack, and it reminds me to a very old game that I used to love and play all the time when I was a kid on my Atari 800XL: '1942 Screaming Wings'.

'1942 Screaming Wings' screen:

Voxel pack from @maxparata, you can find more awesome assets!

Immediately, I knew that it was a great opportunity to take that game as a concept and start from there. Also, to make a homage for that game that I enjoyed so much long time ago.

Game Concept:

'1942 Screaming Wings' was a top down scroll shooter and the main goal was to reach the aircraft carrier at the end. It was fast and it needs some skills on later levels to avoid and shoot the swarms of enemy planes. So, how could I integrate the jam's theme into the game?

'Heal' is the theme for this Jam, I was toying with some ideas and then I imagine the player guiding this P38 Lightning plane but without weapon systems and also in very bad shape. The only thing that the player could do, it is to guide the plane to the nearest aircraft carrier to be 'healed' while swarms of enemies try to shoot down the player's planes.

However, after arriving to the nearest aircraft carrier, the player would look for a mechanic who could 'heal' her airplane, but I remember this painful image that I have in my memories as a kid:

So there, the mechanic in the aircraft carrier would say to the player that her airplane could not be 'healed' in this place, but they will offer the player some options, like +'x'% of armor, 'y' numbers of evasive stunts, etc. Some kind of buffs that allow the player to continue to other aircraft carrier. Basically, similar to the buff systems from roguelike games.

Now, I have a game concept that I like, a top-down scroll game where the player needs to control a airplane in bad shape, without the ability to shoot. The player needs to evade and escape in order to get to the next airplane carrier to look for someone who could help her 'heal' the airplane.

For that reason, it is that I'm calling this project 'Silent Wings 2491'.

Next things to develop:

    define the player's experience

    refine the gameplay

    start with some experiments: movement, camera, etc.

[NEW UPDATE! n° 3]

Enemy development 

Hi! I’ve been busy developing the ‘enemy part’ of the game. However, I managed to make a huge progress in this part. I’m also including some problems that I had during the development of this part. Maybe it would be helpful for you..

Enemy variants and movement

As I posted before, there are three types of enemies: following a pattern, trying to chase the player and minibosses. I started to think in a way to increase the difficulty of these enemies once the player reaches new levels.

So the first thing that I did was to develop a way to modify the enemies’s stats based on levels. I created a scriptable object that manages all this information. This allows me to fine tune the parameters in an easy way.

Also, I make some variants of the assets in order to make the game more colorful. Since the stats of the enemies are stored in the scriptable object. I managed to separate the stats and the look of the airplane (prefab asset). 

This separation is important for me, because I can manage to instantiate any airplane based on its “type/stats” and later manage to associate the asset. In order to do that, I created two main objects: enemy spawner and object pooler.

The object pooler is responsible for instantiating a pool of airplanes and storing them in categories piles. Later on, the enemy spawner can take some of these instantiated assets and merge them with the corresponding stat info. Once the airplane asset is not needed, the object pooler will deactivate it and store its reference on the pool. (I implemented a Queue stack for that)

Every time that the enemy spawner calls a new enemy asset from the object pooler, it will give to the enemy asset the information about movement, stats and other data; based on information about the wave. This is also a scriptable object that has the information about the enemy’s stat, enemy movement, and other data. 

Enemy Spawner  ←—----> Object Pooler

(wave config)                (level information)

The following images show the waypoint pattern and chase pattern. Minibosses are a variant of the waypoint variant.

Problems found

These 3 problems where the most time consuming issues that I faced in this stage: 

1.- Race condition with the object pooler: The object pooler instantiates the enemies based on the quantity and type of the airplanes:

Then, it creates a table (dictionary) where it stores the references of each of these elements. This is done to later, be able to manage the deactivation and activation of the objects in the pool. However, I put the method to create this table on ‘Start’. And I was getting a null reference, since the spawner was trying to get the info from this table, but it was not already finished yet. So I moved the method to ‘Awake’ instead.

2.- Prefab and  camera orientation: because I’m still implementing these systems in a ‘testing scene’ I didn’t notice that the camera was orientated in a way where the x and z axis were reversed. Also, the airplanes' prefabs have different orientations. When I started to apply some rotation to the enemies, I got strange results. Later on I noticed these problems.

3.- Reset conditions on the airplanes: I forgot to reset some internal conditions when I put the enemies back into the object pool. Because of that omission, on the second call of these elements, there were strange behaviours once they would be called later. I implemented a ‘reset’ method to fix this issue.

Next steps:

• Player’s stats, health and perks/buffs 
• Improve player’s movement

[NEW UPDATE n°4]

Hi! I just wanted to share a strange behaviour that I got while making my game, that might be useful for everyone. So the long story short is that I was implementing a 'roguelike' skill selection screen. I created a method to get some random skills to show. This is the pseudocode:

Skills[] listSkill;

float[] values;

listSkill = MethodToGetRandomSkills(out values)

for(int index = 0; index < subsetOfListSkill; index++)

{

    button[index].OnClick.AddListener(

    delegate {

            ApplyThisSkillToPlayer(listSkill[index], values[index]);

    })

}

The problem was related to the delegate part, I was getting bad values, applying different skills and values. Not the one I selected. Then I found this explanation about using 'Addlistener' in a loop: https://answers.unity.com/questions/1195925/when-using-addlistener-can-multiple-...

I tried the local variable fix and it works when I called the method for the first time:

for(int index = 0; index < subsetOfListSkill; index++)

{

    Skill tempSkill = listSkill[index];

    float tempValue = values[index];

    button[index].OnClick.AddListener(

    delegate {

            ApplyThisSkillToPlayer(tempSkill, tempValue);

    })

}

After other calls of the method, I was getting other strange behaviours. At the end, I solved it by not using AddListener, but storing the selected skills and values in a global array. And calling the method using the 'OnClick' on the Unity Editor, not from the code.

[NEW UPDATE n°5]

Final implementation

Now that the demo is already available to play here I can write about the final stage of implementation. 

Collisions