Hello everyone, I am Cattan and welcome to the first devlog of "The Cycle of War: Trench Assault".
I signed up for this game jam not too sure of what I was going to do and hoping the theme would point me in the right direction once announced. Originally it did not but after a bit of thinking, bouncing ideas with fellow jammers and rewatching Sam Mendes' 1917, I realised that something like trench warfare fits the idea of a "cycle" very well. Too well: In essence, it is an endless cycle of attacking and defending the same trench for no immediately discernable reason. And so an idea was born.
Okay but what's the game?
An excellent question, thank you for asking.
It was very quickly obvious to me that I would be making a sort of "strategy" game (though it is actually set at the operational level, not strategic, but that is entirely irrelevant). The idea would be for the player to prepare the assault of the enemy trench or the defence of their own, then watch in horror as the little sprites execute their orders and die gruesome deaths. Being a one-woman team, I wanted to keep the scope small and limit my reliance on external assets ; I looked a bit but it quickly became clear that the game would have to be 2D so that I would be able to cobble together sprites myself. Hence my lovely art style:
These circles have no idea what they're in for!
As implied above, the game would be divided into two phases: One where the player prepares the battle by placing assault ladders, mortars, guns and barbed wire, and a second more passive phase where the player would enjoy the mess the helped create ; I will try to implement call-in artillery strikes during the assault phase as well as a time acceleration mode ; but those are optional feature if I have enough time left. I originally planned to replace the little circles but to be honest, they are starting to grow on me... Or perhaps that is just their ghosts haunting me.
Early prototype.
The first thing I did, after quickly making a few basic sprites, was test the waters: This being my first game, I am not skilled enough in either Unity or C# to feel confident I can deliver. I began by making my soldiers move and shoot their rifles, then made the ladders spawn soldiers (it's how they go over the top) and then made the bullets destroy the heinous enemy circles. Satisfied that this was working, I went on to design a basic UI and game instructions:
It's a machinegun where the mortar should be but it's not like anyone can tell. I mean it's not like I could spot the typo, so...
By now after two days of work, the prototype allows the player to navigate the menu, start playing and place their ladders. The next step will be to allow the computer to place its own defences in retaliation. This should be fairly easy: The plan is to have a number of pre-set locations and have the computer roll the dice for which location to chose. If I have time, I would like to also implement a rudimentary "AI" that would take into account where the player has placed their resources and try to counter them. For instance it could read where the player's ladders are, and spawn its machineguns to face them to the best of its ability.
Speaking of the computer's ability to place objects, 
Here is one method my humble beginner self is fairly proud of: I originally wanted it to spawn the ladders in the player's "inventory" before they could be placed on the trench line, but halfway through I realised that it could absolutely be used for any of the player's resources. And so SpawnRessource was born. So far the entire project has been a great learning opportunity but this method in particular was a bit of a eureka moment. I look forward to having more of those over the next two weeks.
That's it for now, thank you for reading! Stay tuned for more news from the frontlines!
