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Reading all these ideas, I can't wait for the month to be over so I can see all these new games.

Personally, I have also been putting together a large and complicated system over the last year, so for this I think I'd rather work up something completely different. A friend sent me a tweet about a game whose attributes are Gumption, Chutzpah, Moxie, Childlike Wonder, the Cut of My Gib, and A Certain Je Ne Sais Quoi. I came up with something goofy on the spot which has been in the back of my head since.

I'm super influenced by Ars Magica and Thousand Year Old Vampire in this moment, so it will probably take notes from those. Very excited to get to work, and to see what everybody else puts together!

I'd give this a post-mortem, but it's not finished! Check out progress here!

Thanks so much for everyone's input!

Unable to cope with the hordes of bug-like enemies continuously besieging your party, you - the healer in your small adventuring group - flee from battle and become lost in the vast caverns of the dungeon. Now, you must find your friends, earn their forgiveness, and escape, all with the only skill you have at your disposal: Heal!

This game started as part of My First Game Jam 2022. If you'd like to see the early progress, check it out here.

If you'd like to see the currect version of the game, you can check it out here.

----------------Progress Update-------------------

I've spent the last week since the Jam ended resting and implementing a basic Behavior Tree, and have been going through Sebastion Lague's A* Pathfinding course on Youtube (which, as you might notice, is not for 2D games) to try and work out some pathfinding issues (i.e. there was no pathfinding). All in all it's been going well. There have been some hiccups; reworking his code to try and fit Unity2D has been a challenge. As a result, it works, but is maybe not perfect. He does have a 2D version, but I don't think it's complete through all 10 episodes.

For the moment, it's working well enough.

Once that's done, I'll add it to the behavior tree, and then begin working on transferring the battle AI (which also doesn't work in its current state) into the behavior tree. I think the structure of the behavior tree will show me the more obvious approach here, as a lot of what was just trial and error becomes at least somewhat more legible in such a structured approach.

As for implementation of the boss, I will probably just use the behavior tree since I have it, though it seems like overkill. I was going to put together a separate Finite State Machine in order run just that, but that also seems like overkill. I might do it just to play with it, though. This is my first actual follow-through on a video game since I started using Unity, so I figure I might as well try everything. For half a second, I was thinking about putting together a GOAP system as well (because for some reason I really like that system), but then I feel like I'm overcomplicating things and possibly getting in trouble because of it. I mean, the game's tiny, but some of this A* star stuff has got it chugging a bit (Sebastion's about to help me with that, though).

I know a lot of people treat Devlogs as more Updates, as in "these are the features we've implemented, and this is how long you have to wait for the next bit," but I don't know that I'm quite there yet. I will say that, though I haven't messed much animation yet, implementation of the behavior tree and pathfinding is a significant jump in progress, so, considering I'll be out of town next week, I'm pretty sure I'm looking at getting the non-boss version out mid-to-late August. Boss version could take a while. I will again be out of town at the end of August, and there's another Jam starting that I'll involved in: "RPG Horror Celebration Jam #3," starting on September 1 and lasting through October, and I'll probably use all of that time, but I imagine I'll be able to implement a boss fight in amongst it. Let's say we're looking at late September to October for a "final" version of the game.

So.

Full game minus boss: Late August

Finished game:  >= Mid-September

I appreciate all the support throughout this process, and am looking forward to the completion of this and the pursuit of many others here in this community.

Ya, definitely animations. I think I want to get some better character sprites before that though.

The animations and design are adorable. Really impressed with the visuals here. A feast for the eyes as well as the stomach.

It's a simple point-and-click, and I don't see anything wrong with that. Maybe some complication could be fun; as is, most screens you have to select everything. I'd say you could build on this. Give us days, or more. Build a story around it: why are they eating this today? Maybe there could be a seasonal aspect, maybe people bring them things, maybe they explore new areas and find new foods/flowers. Maybe there's an experimentation aspect, where you have to pick the right things, or you could unlock new recipes.

Honeslty, your art style will support a lot. This isn't gonna make any sense, but check out the Artful Escape. That game doesn't do a lot besides its art style, but it might give you a jumping off point.

Couldn't get the game to load; it froze about halfway through the loading bar after starting, and my computer's no slouch. Maybe some optimization is in order. Fix that, and I'll definitely play it. It looks interesting.

The tutorial is hard to read on the game's title screen. Maybe give it a solid color background, or a window.

Character design is great.

The gameplay itself is impressive, and actually I played a game kind of like this last night called Idle Champions of the Forgotten Realms. For me, two things stand out to fix. One is that the game, at least initially, is so easy for the fighters that your healing isn't really necessary, so some game balance would be good. I see that balancing is an issue, and part of that might be that you spawn with all your allies. The game I played last night made unlock your allies as more enemies attacked. Just a focus on pacing in general (maybe start with one ally and one enemy type, and ramp it up) could help.

 Second, I think the visual space could be somewhat better designed. The background could be upgraded (not really sure what we're standing on), and the camera could be moved back a bit so we can see more what's going on. I don't really know where we are or why these people are attacking, so besides the phenomenal jokiness of the character design, I'm just never really sure what's going on.

But I do think as sort of a prototype, this is pretty cool. Maybe focus a bit on what you want the experience to be, what you want the player to get out of it, and I think you'll have a pretty successful thing. You've already got the basics down.

Hard to add anything after Dusto, but I'll try. I think the concept here is great. There's a lot of places you could take this, whether that be the Moonlighter / Recettear route, or a more straightforward shopkeeper sim. What I'm trying to say is, this is not new territory you're entering here. The shopkeeper genre is, if not mainstream, then at least well-established.

The game itself is a good start, I'd say. As Dusto said, a bit of expansion in the book tab would be nice, and maybe that could be gameified. Games like Moonlighter and Recettear have a dungeon-crawl aspect; yours could be more research based. You could gather notes from your fellow herbalists or through trial and error about what plants work for what. I'd also say a bit more room would be nice. Three pots is a good start, but the ability to expand your shop would be pretty cool.

As far as replayability, I would say another gameplay loop would be good. Stardew Valley has the farming, but you can also fish or mine or fight monsters or romance people. The shop maintenance is a good base, but maybe expand a bit so the game isn't quite so one-and-done. I like how focused the game is on herbalism; maybe the introduction of a narrative would help us as the player learn the art of herbalism with the character. They're obviously pretty new to this since only know what one plant does. This could both expand the gameplay as well as to give people a reason to get invested.

As Dusto said, the amount of systems in here is impressive. Great job so far, and keep up the good work!

The music is gorgeous, and the writing is thought-provoking, if a little unfocused. Or maybe it's a little too focused. Instead of having a single path, it might be nice to have multiple, give us different perspectives. One thing that might be nice is a story, a fictional (or not so fictional) narrative, or some sort of gameification, a struggle to overcome. That could help with engagement. But as is, it's very relaxing, and I enjoyed my time with it. The visuals are stunning, the music is beautiful. Nicely done.

Dusto! Great to play your game!

It's a cute little story, and I love the concept. Your little character model is amazing, and I love all the animation. I do think it could use some complication. At the moment, it seems like there are two states: hopping and at rest. Maybe the addition of an "ability" or two, like a sprint or springy long jump, could add to the intrigue.  Also, the flowers and fireflies are very pretty, but a little change in scenery might be nice; the top down view isn't bad, but it doesn't really let us see our surroundings that well, which means finding anything can be difficult, especially with how dark it is.

I think this is the start to something really nice. You have a lot going for you already, and I think with some work this has legs, as they say.

Man, these puzzles are brutal. I think the hit boxes on the spikes could be a little more obvious, though I love when you surprise me with a death, like when jumping over a certain spike patch. I agree with Dusto that difficulty could be tweaked, though I respect it. The riddle has me stumped, and hints would be nice; just don't give it away. The music's hilarious (in a good way), though it would be nice to have a volume control.

Thanks so much! I'm excited for you to see more!

This art is great! I agree with DustoTail that the story is a bit abrupt. I would add that the player character has only the basest reason to stay in this situation (the gun), and would, I imagine, be looking for a way to get out. Maybe pretending to drink the wine, attempting to overpower the banana and flee early on. We need more of a reason for them to go along. Maybe more choices would help. We're only two at the very end, and one of them has no bearing on the story. I think making this more of a conversation where you as the character get to try and talk the banana down would be more interesting and believable.

Hope that helps!

Very good points.  Initially I had planned to use the mouse for targeting, but tabbing turned out to be easier to implement at the time. Now that the jam is over, that should probably be my first fix. Also turning off colliders between allies is a brilliant solution, and seems so obvious now that you say it. Thanks!

Game Title / URL:

Pitch/Information: You're a healer, so all you can do is heal! In battle yesterday, your party was overwhelmed, and without the ability to defend yourself you fled into the dungeon in terror, abandoning your party members. Now you must solve the dungeon's puzzles and find them, and escape together!

Version Notes: There's no enemies in this version, but it still functions as a mild first level of a narrative-based dungeon-crawl DND-esque kind of thing. Eventually, there will be enemies that spawn after certain actions, and an end-level boss.

I'd Like Feedback On:  Looking for bugs right now, but would also take any constructive criticism / ideas for future iterations. As far as bugs go, I know that if you have yourself (and possibly something/one else) targeted when you go through a door, the targeting system will get stuck. Also, some typos.

This game is great! I could play a whole game of this. Really clever mechanics. Kind of needs a menu/quit button, but it's really fun.

I really love this aesthetic. Looking forward to see where you go in the future.

------------Final Day of the Jam-----------

Okay, y'all. I got everything done I said I would in the last post. It's janky as heck, but it is currently a self-contained game.

In the coming weeks, I plan to implement all the Ally and Enemy AI, tweak and polish everything that's present here, and hopefully put together a little boss fight at the end. I'll keep y'all posted as those features are added.

I've linked it below. Check it out if you get the time, and thank you so much to everyone for your input and community.

Good job everybody!

--------------------------------Day Too Many-------------------------------

I don't know if y'all were aware, but doing this by yourself is hard. It takes a long time.

Not to complain. As they say about languages, immersion is the best teacher. And to be quite honest, I'm pretty impressed with myself. I'm moving more easily through a lot of the coding stuff than I thought I would. I learned Unity through their Unity Learn program, and like a lot of the feedback I saw, a lot of it didn't sink in, and I've spent several months struggling to recall many simple things, getting fractionally through projects before deciding I needed to work on something "simpler" in order to figure out how to execute a certain mechanic.

But with this--and maybe it's the deadline looming--I've found that I'm working through problems instead of just immediately going to tutorials or stack overflow to fix my problems for me, and I am more often than not successful. For example: I programmed the entirety of the AI for my game without referencing any AI projects I'd put together before or tutorials online. None of it works, but I'm confident in the overall structure, and know that, with a bit of poking around and research, I can probably fix it up fine. It's not any of the fancy systems I referenced in an earlier post (FSM, GOAP, whatever), but it's AI. (Eventually, outside of the scope of the jam, I'd like to take this and make Behavior Trees out of it. It seems the most useful overall.)

Speaking of structure (and I was), outside of all this coding, it took me until yesterday or the day before to actually put together the structure of my game: all the rooms, what the player is supposed to do to beat it. It seems pretty late in the process to do that, but as a writer I've always been a "let the story tell itself" kind of guy, and I will say that, with as many of the pieces in place as I had, putting the game structure together has been pretty simple.

Okay, the good news and the bad news.

Bad news first: I'm not sure I'm going to get the AI and abilities totally working by the end of the jam. I'm disappointed that y'all (and thus possibly no one ever) will get to see this baby in complete action. I'm not saying it's going to be glorious, but I'd like people to see it in its final form.

The good news: I will have the "story" down, dialogue, game structure, exposition, et al. You'll wake up at the beginning, be able to go and find your allies hear them out, and exit the dungeon at the end. There's even some very very light puzzles to solve, which of course would be enhanced by enemy involvement.

Either way, I'm going to finish this game, even if it's after the deadline. It has already taught me a lot, and will have been a worthwhile experience. Thank you everyone for your help and kind words.

Maybe I'll drop a short dungeon tour here later.

——————————-Day 5? Really?————————

After 2 days of professional and social obligation, I finally got back to this this evening. And by that I mean I spent 4 hours coding and checked none of it, hence the absence of a neat little progress gif. I promise I’ll post one tomorrow.

So far, I have most of the ally ai coded (though who knows if any of it works), including a hilarious little wander script that just has my boys wander ‘round the screen if you stand around too long.

Still need to put together a targeting system, and enemy ai, which shouldn’t take much. I have a VERY simple enmity system that I need to structure, then comes the bug spawner, then multiple rooms (roguelike?), then finally ally dialogue. Animations at some point. Oh, but I did do the scene transitions, as expected. Still a ways to go, but feeling good. 

I’m so sorry, I finally got back to the devlog after a couple days. Your music is stunning! I don’t know that my little clunker would live up to your standards, but I’m definitely willing to chat!

oh, that’s great! That sounds like a great way to lower/raise the difficulty

------------------------------------------------Day2-----------------------------------------

I spent most of the rest of my day Saturday cleaning up from my canvas mistake, and didn't get around to character movement and abilities until yesterday. Of course, a good portion of my time was still spent on UI elements, but I argue that they're necessary for the experience? You can't tell what's happening without health bars.

Below, you can see most of the product of my labor until now. Your healer has 3 abilities: an aoe heal, a targeted heal (not yet implemented), and a shield. On the left hand side of the screen, there're some very basic cooldown timers, and as the healer runs around you can see him popping abilities--a green circle which will heal anything (though maybe an easy mode where it only heals allies?), and a blue cylinder which acts as a shield (via a wider collider). The targeted heal will also count down, but it doesn't do anything.

AOE heal and shield abilities

In addition to these abilities, these are the basic models I'm working with at the moment. The detective is your tank, and the astronaut is your mage. I'll probably try to find better models at some point, but who knows if that will be by the end of the jam.

Though there's nothing much going on here, I'm happy to say that just running back and forth, trying to heal both your allies (and the rock tower) at the same time is weirdly fun. I spent maybe half an hour at the end of the night just playing around with it. It's quicker in game than in this .gif.

I'm hoping I can get your allies walking around a bit tomorrow, and maybe even a small version of an AI engine (probably something simple, autonomous movement or an FSM--it might actually end up being GOAP?) so it becomes even more challenging. We'll see how much time I spend on that and how much time I spend on screen transitions. All the buttons work. I love buttons.

My plan at this point is that every ally gets three abilities: the tank will have an aoe taunt which raises his armor and grants enmity, a long range taunt which gives a lot of enmity, and a simple attack to one enemy. The mage will have an aoe attack (which damages everyone but him), a single target long range attack (which does a lot of damage), and a "potion drink" (which does triple duty of mild healing, increasing armor, and lowering enmity). These, of course, are npc abilities, so the player will probably only see the effects.

I'm also thinking of giving the healer a very weak attack, which will do a little damage to the small bugs, but nothing to the big ones. He's got something sort of like that now, but that's just because I need a way to damage allies so I  can make sure all my features are working. (Your allies disappear when their health goes to 0.)

The mage will also run away if his health gets too low. Not out of the room (though that might be cool), but also not doing damage. Your allies will follow you, but only if everything is dead.

The bugs will just run at you. They do damage when they run into you, and they have an enmity meter, so they'll attack whoever is at the top of it (healing also gains enmity, not just taunts and damage). I'm not too nervous about that AI. Your allies, though...

The other stuff is more my comfort zone: the tank and mage will give little speeches when you find them, which change if you already have the other one. In addition, I'd love to add little lines requesting healing or yelling about the battle. Also, I think I can get some simple voice acting done. It might be hard to believe, but doing game jams is my way of building a game writing portfolio, even though I haven't done a lot of writing yet.

This version of the game will just be one dungeon level, maybe 6 or 7 rooms? Of course, I'd like it to be more, with several levels. I plan on working on this until its "finished," whatever that means, and hopefully I can upgrade the visuals in that time as well. The assets are fine as they are--this doesn't need to be amazing--but the timers are pretty jank, and there are no animations. I think that might be beyond  the scope of the jam, at least for me, but I would like to do something about that at some point.

Either way, I'm happy with where I am so far, and excited for wherever this goes. Thank you everyone for taking this journey with me!

man, people never tell the story of the sidekick. Gameplay is looking fun

That name is killer. Just my kinda goofy

I’m excited to see all the narrative implications of this play out. Nice concept!

I’m really loving the non-combat focus so many people are taking with this jam. Great concept!

wow looks good! Excited to see where you get with this

this is many wonderful things all wrapped into one. Can’t wait to see what you come up with

that song is gonna be stuck in my head for the rest of the night. Excited for updates on this!

I love the concept! I look forward to seeing how it comes together!

Personally, I look forward to the rise in irritated-healer-type games.

As a DPS main, I look forward to being taught a valuable lesson about adjusting

Super impressive progress. Looking forward to the next steps!

I just realized that somehow I  was designing the whole game inside the canvas. As in all object placements and backgrounds and everything I was blowing up to fit inside the canvas. I was wondering why I had to make everything so big.

Thankfully, all I have is a few objects, two scenes, and some basic room stuff, so it's not too terrible to start over, though frustrating. This could have been a huge mistake if I caught it later.

Let's hope I make most of my mistakes in the here and now, and not later.

---------------------------------------------------------Day 1---------------------------------------------------

Unable to cope with the hordes of bug-like enemies continuously besieging your party, you - the healer in your small adventuring group - get separated from your blood-hungry companions and become lost in the vast caverns of the dungeon. Now, you must find your friends, convince them to leave, and escape, all with the only skill you have at your disposal: Heal!

So starts the journey. I'm going this one alone, and probably will continue to do so for a couple jams, at least until I've proven to myself that I can follow through with my limited knowledge. So far so good: I did the opposite of my plan and used my first few hours downloading asset packs from the Unity Asset Store and compiling a title screen instead of working on important things like a character/game controller, AI for both the enemies and your allies, either building or figuring out how to rogue-like the rooms of this dungeon.

Well, we'll get there.

Either way, it's good to get started, and I'm happy to be doing this in conjunction with so many others. I'm looking forward to seeing all of your games, and I'm excited for you to see mine!