Day 7? Noon.
Where did the time go? I wasn't feeling all too hot for the past few days so I didn't make any progress. I'll be starting up again but not until pretty late into the day. Here's a few more things that I've thought about.
"Falling" dreams
I need to confirm that this still works after I made a few changes to my prefabs. Other than that, I need a way to load in some player data to determine which level of difficulty to use and a way to save the completion data for "reality" phase (which is required for all the phases).
"Nightmares"
From working with my basic enemy AI, I figured out that I can use Fp to move across XZ at any angle. Now I have to decide how Fc comes into play. For the sake of progress, I might make the camera follow without user control for now. Once I have player movement correct for that, I can continue to work out how to incorporate the camera. Thinking back to games like the Sly Cooper series, the direction upon input is dependent on Fc but you can still go in all directions and rotate your character without having to force Fc and Fp to be the same (ignoring the Y axis). After that, I'll have to figure out a way for the boss to move and take action. The player actions can be taken from the "survival" dreams.
"Chase dreams"
I haven't touched this one yet. I should probably set up a simple path for the camera work first. Then I can worry about a wall that follows the path to the exit and kills the player on touch. After that, I can add the maze feature. At that point, the wall will need some implementation of path finding. Time to break out the ol' A*, right? I can probably get away with just using BFS, the mazes will be static once created.
"Survival" dreams
A lot of UI work for skills and health. I should give some health bars to the enemies as well. Using player skills and attacking still does nothing, especially since there's no hitbox or range for player attacks yet. The skills will be an interesting part since I need to figure out animations, projectiles, maybe some events, and who knows what else.
"Reality" phase
I haven't really talked much about this so far. My original intentions were to have this all be in 2D to provide a stark contrast between reality and dreams. This kinda plays into the idea of dreaming of heroics, the player can see all the exciting and heroic things in greater depth. But now, it being in 2D might make it less work for me to do in the week remaining. I was also hoping to make this more than a few glorified menus to select skills and check progress, but with no new ideas and the lack of time, it'll probably stay as that.
As you can see, even if this is the extent of the game, there's still a lot to do!
I'm going to make an early half-way point retrospective because I'm already here. The first two days were very gung-ho but turned out to be a lot of redoing work. I could probably have avoided this if I spent the first day doing tutorials but hey, who wants to do that right? Day 3 and 4 had some solid work but I need to stop hopping all over the place. This is definitely a by-product of me not planning carefully and overestimating my ability. I honestly thought I could complete each dream within a day or 2 without much trouble so I didn't need to plan out beyond the order of tackling them. So far, it hasn't come true but we'll have to tally up hours at the end of the jam.
These were my goals for this jam (aiming at 3/5 completion):
- (B)uild some interact-able landscape.
- Spawn and script enemy (AI).
- (P)rocedurally generate something.
- Incorporate the "dream" (t)heme.
- Do something new and (l)earn.
I have definitely completed goal L and AI (it's simple but it's there). I've kinda done goal T, though I won't claim it complete until I have the "reality" phase completed. So all in all, I got what I asked for and everything else is gravy. That said, I want more gravy.
Take care of your health!
- Frowning Asinus