Hello there, anyone who stumbles across this 👋

I've been meaning to actually participate in a proper game jam for ages, so woohoo, I'm finally doing it!

When I read the theme - the first ever thing that came to my mind was something like a step-based puzzle where you lose health every step, and then can heal up.

So it would be something like a Helltaker-style game, in terms of gameplay, but much simpler as I don't have much trust in my focus/spare time for this.

So I went and grabbed some of the amazing CC0 assets by Kenney and got to work

That was the first thing I put together after spending like 4 hours reading about unity sprites/tilemaps and watching the old Brackeys videos.

Just as a side-note, I have some unity experience from building worlds for VRChat, and I'm a web developer by trade, but I never before have built an actual game, or worked with 2d at all, so almost all of this was new to me, which was super fun!

So after figuring out how the heck you do the tilemaps and layers and all that fun stuff - I got my first level working, and slapped together some victory UI!

I tried using the new fancy UIToolkit for the UI, but it turned out to be so detached from any familiar unity flows that I went back to the regular old Unity UI.

I also never tried DOTween before, so I decide that this is as good of a time as any, an implemented the player controller by moving a Rigidbody2D with DOTween and having a separate tilemap layer that has colliders on it.

Also due to specifics of my previous experience - i never worked with Unity Events before. And while they can get kinda unwieldy - its still super awesome to just be able to drag and drop stuff around to register event handlers, and that's how p much all my logic works in the game, including the input using the new Unity Input package which I never had proper experience with before either, super fun!

I also wanted my "heal" sprites to have some life in them, so I took them to aseprite and just paitned some basic frame by frame progressions

Then I was like hmm, its still not visible that well, so I went and made a tiny shader in Unity ShaderGarph (which I do have some experience in build using just code in unity 2019.4) to make them pop a bit more and added basic post processing to have a bit of bloom as well.

So now it was time to build levels, and that's when i realized that I have no clue how to really do that as I just made it all in one scene 🤔

I don't know if that was a good idea or not, but I ended up writing a little game manager script that has a list of scene names, and then it additively loads and unloads them as you complete levels.

And then have my LevelController script at the top of each level scene be responsible for the level-specific stuff.

Which worked! But i didn't have a way to restart properly anymore, so I made this whole elaborate thing that saves the tiles in a tilemap, and resets it to the saved values when you click restart (so the consumed healing pads become un-consumed)

And with that I sorta had everything I needed... I'll skip over a ton of bugfixing of basically everything and like 4 iterations of every class I have, especially everything that was connected to movement and checking whether I can or can't move somewhere...

But hey! I can now build levels, so I made a couple (like, actually 2)

And then I was like, "I need progression!". So I added a health upgrade, and that's where I got kinda stuck for now. While upgrading health was easy, restarting the levels broke it completely, so I'll need to think about how do I wanna take away upgrades on death/restart, and whether I wanna do it at all? In the worst case scenario I can just save the "start health" on each level and force-reset to that. and hope that's gonna be good enough.

I also have "wait" functionality, which i wanted to use for moving platforms, e.g. standing on a log going down a river, but something tells me I should actually try and make some levels before spending 5 more hours on code.

OH! And the very last thing I did was to add some rudimentary sounds I found on freesound + an ambiance from a unity asset store pack, which I think is too ominous, but that was the best I found so far.

At any rate, hope this was at least somewhat interesting to read. Even if that's as far as I'll get - this was a ton of fun, and I learned so many new things - it makes me excited to not make the same mistakes in the future... hopefully... doubtfully...