Hi! This will be my first time doing a game jam. I watched the bruised ego stream last year and loved the whole concept, so I was really excited to participate this time. I have experience with Game Maker Studio and Godot, and I could make a solid pixel art game in Godot within the time given. But with a full five weeks to make a game, I wanted to challenge myself and try to make a 3D game in unity. I've been slowly figuring out Blender in the last couple of months and I felt the urge to try something in 3D.

I was interested in Charlene because of her youthful nature and role as a sidekick looking up to Gigantimus as a hero. She's a character who is young enough not to fully understand the impact of all the death and destruction around her, instead seeing a more colorful world with the robot as a superhero. I loved the irony of having this high stakes world under attack rendered as a colorful collectathon. I'm still brainstorming on game mechanics. Part of me wants a simple turn based combat system. It needs to have some combat to accommodate Dark Schippie Dues. 

So, here's my first go at making a Charlene model. While I've been practicing blender, I've never made a whole human character before. She kind of has a gamecube Animal Crossing look going on right now. I didn't add the glasses and backpack yet, and I found her hair was way too difficult to match what Kyle drew for a low poly look but I gave it a shot

(UPDATED - better pic with glasses and toon shader, won't worry about the backpack just yet)

Wow, the jam's only just started and you've already created such a cute player model. That's looking really nice.

In regards to your comment about your game needing combat so you can fight Dark Schippie Dues, I don't personally believe you necessarily have to interpret that rule as a requirement for combat.
So that everyone is free to make the style of game they want to, I think it would be better if we saw it as a boss challenge rather than focusing so literally on the word "fight". I think there were a few games like that last year, though I'm not 100% certain on which ones anymore.

If you're wanting to make a game without combat, I actually think that's very admirable. There are a couple of ways I think you could compete with Dark Schippie Dues that aren't literal combat.

If you're doing a lot of platforming in your game, then you could race them through some sort of obstacle course/stage.
Otherwise, maybe something in the vein of hide and seek or tag from Pokepark would be cool.
It might be more complicated, but a having a competition like the eating competition against Mr. Vile in Banjo-Kazooie or the Crystal Popcorn game against Hunter in Spyro 2 would feel a lot like a direct boss challenge to me. Something were you could hurt Dues' score by getting something they were going for without necessarily having to physically hurt them.

Though, all of that said, ultimately you're at the mercy of a lot of different judges and your game's rating depends on their interpretation of your interpretation of what the phrasing "optional boss fight" means. So sometimes it's safer to go with the most obvious thing.

Good luck with the jam! I'm looking forward to the final product whatever direction you take it in.

MeBID is right--a game doesn't necessarily need a combat system in order to have a boss battle against Dark Schippie Dues. Last year we saw a lot of creative interpretations of the rule, and in fact the 2021 winner didn't really feature a traditional "boss battle" with Dark Schippie Dues. So I'd suggest just following your fun and worrying about DSP later 

Thanks for the responses, including from Kyle himself. I meant to reply to MeBID earlier, your post gave me some good food for thought. I've actually been skimming through last year's stream to see how different games integrated DSD. 

A game without combat wasn't really an active goal of mine, I was more worried about setting up enemy AI in 3D space. After prototyping some ideas, I found implementing what I know about steering behaviors isn't really different in 3D especially combined with Unity's built-in character controller. It only took a few minutes to get an enemy smoothly chasing Charlene across slopey terrain and slow down on arrival. I do have one interesting idea for a battle system that I sort of want to explore.

I've got a small video of Charlene running around an environment I made to get a feel for the terrain tools with the enemy following. Since asset packs are okay, I'm using animations from Mixamo's free library. Charlene's run is looking cute.

Work on the game slowly continues. Littlekittenbit has joined the project as the character artist. I couldn't resist showing off their fantastic artwork. They took my rough concept sketches and are making these characters look amazing! 

The dialogue system isn't fully implemented in-game, this is just a mockup for experimenting with UI placement. The final textbox will look better than this, I just wanted to get a basic idea down. I'm so happy to have littlekittenbit involved, I love their art so much. With an artist and composer, I'm starting to feel the pressure to make sure the rest of the game lives up to their quality work.