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Right now I'm just trying to get things to work. I'm still tweaking attack speeds and values. 

Day 9 and I feel like I have the Minimum Viable Product I was aiming for. Generally speaking.

Today while looking at adding environmental hazards I realized I'd been using my tilemap all wrong. I was using what was supposed to be empty space as my floor. After some adjustments I have my play area looking much better. 

I also overhauled my Spawn System so now I have much more control over my spawning waves.  I'm still trying to figure out how to increase my enemy spawn count after finishing my defined waves and looping back to start. I'm sure some more research and experimenting will turn up a solution.

As per the analogy I read before starting this jam, I'm done baking my cake. I now have the core of what this game is supposed to be. From now until submission I'll be adding things to make the game more user friendly and enjoyable. 

Unfortunately my Sprites are actually several separate objects with separate renderers. I'm sure I can find some code somewhere that allows me to place the healthbar in a location referencing the camera versus object position, but that's going to be later in dev.

Day 8 and I'm a little behind schedule now. I was affected by the Rogers internet outage in Canada so I couldn't post any update. It also forced me to move my schedule around a bit.

Yesterday I was able to fairly easily create my powerups and add a mana limit to spells. I also made it so an item has to be picked up to unlock the heal beam. After that I tried to get a head a little bit and worked on creating a Start Menu, Game Over screen, and a way to restart the game. All of these were easy to implement, I just learned how to do all that in the Unity tutorial I've been doing on the side. I ran into a game breaking bug when I tried to put in my code a way to pause everything once the Game Over was triggered. My Editor kept crashing whenever I tried to run the game.

This morning I fixed it, I was using a "while" statement when I should have been using an "if" statement. All of my time today was taken up by working on animations. I kept running into issues and having to do research, as this was my first time having to actually make animations. I started to hit a rhythm this afternoon and was able to knock out the animations for my player, basic monster, and Ally. I also added background music and some sound effects as well. 

I had hoped to finish building environmental hazards and spawning waves of enemies today, but it'll have to wait until tomorrow. I also need to figure out how to flip my gameobjects without flipping their attached healthbars.

Day 6 and I resolved my issue. The "0 Transform" of my sprites was not actually the center of my sprites. I thought of it last night to test and found that if I reset my transform on my Tank sprite it sat a bit left of where it was supposed to go. Today I reset all the children objects to 0 Transform and after messing around a bit I got it working. My boss is still slightly off center, but I think that may just be a scale issue. It's just slightly off though so it shouldn't have much of an impact. 

Made a couple more enemy and ally prefabs as per schedule today. Enemies are very easy to duplicate, so that won't be a problem. Allies take a bit more time, but as of right now I only need a couple. I may look at somehow coding my Spawn Manager to combine random sprites to make procedurally generated allies, but that's gonna go on the backlog.

Tomorrow will be a long night. I'm going to make it so the heal beam has to be unlocked with an item, add power ups, and introduce mana to limit healing.

An issue that I'm going to have to plan to mitigate is that my sprites are designed for attacking just right and left. There's no animation for down or up attacks.  I'm going to have to figure out a way that sprites attacking each other are always on the same X-Axis.

Screenshot below is what I did to test where my sprites were versus where my code expected them to be. Once they were in the white square I knew they were good to go.

Day 5 and I've run into my first major issue. 

Today I got my beam heal working, and that was fine. It took a lot longer than I expected, and it doesn't look as nice as I'd like. I may have to revisit it later when I start working on animations and effects to see if I can make it look better. But it heals over time, which is what I wanted it to essentially do. 

I ran into my problem when I started making more prefabs for allies and enemies. As I placed them in the scene to test if their scripts were working it seemed like they're getting stuck on something. I believe it has something to do with how I have them finding and moving at each other. When my NPC is on the left and monster on the right, they don't move to the correct distance of each other. It's very odd because the monster script is almost identical to the NPC script so they should behave similarly. 

I'll do some research tomorrow during the day and take another crack at it tomorrow. I'm still on schedule as long as I get this fixed by tomorrow night.

Day 4, no major issues yet. I'm ahead of schedule, but I know I'll need more time to work on animations than I've given myself. 

My enemy and ally are now able to attack each other and lower healthbars. I've also made it so I can do a heal in melee range on my ally. 

I have to give a huge thank you to the Brackeys YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/c/Brackeys. I've been using his tutorials almost every day for this jam. I found out yesterday that he stopped making video content a couple years ago, which is disappointing. 

Tomorrow's goal is to add a ranged heal ability, as well as creating more prefabs for my allies and enemies. I also hope to make a Boss prefab tomorrow, which realistically will just be a upscaled enemy.

I also downloaded ShareX so I can start uploading gifs of some action. I meant to include the Console so you can see when I'm clicking to heal as well.

I really like your sound, it's a really good fit for medieval/fantasy stuff. I have some music that came with the assets I got, but if it doesn't match what I'm looking for I'll let you know.

Day 3 and things are still going well.

I was able to get my ally and enemy prefabs to Move and "Attack" fairly easily. This is still without animations or any other affects, the "Attack" for now is just a Debug message. The main priority today was getting the two objects to find each other, move to within a certain distance, and then stop. So far I've cleaned up any bugs as I come across them, but I'm sure more will start cropping up as things get more complicated.

I had some extra time today so I even knocked out creating the healthbars. It was more difficult to learn how to d than I had anticipated, but it should be easy to do on future projects.  I was hoping to even get the Attacks to start lowering the healthbar, but I think I'll leave that to tomorrow as per my schedule. 

I just realized I never looked at any screenshot programs so I just grabbed a shot with the snipping tool. I'm still getting the issue where my tiles have little lines at the edge, even after turning off anti-aliasing. but that's a problem for later. 

I've always been a DPS, too scared to go healer. Too much responsibility and running around. This game will be a safe space for DPS to feel the pain they cause healers, lol.

Day 2 of development and I'm still on schedule, which basically means I haven't done much because my first few days are planned to be simple steps. 

I've found all the assets I should need for this game, including pixels, animations, particle effects, and audio. 

My player character is able to move around a room and collide with the walls. A simple thing, but this is my first time really working in 2D with Unity so I had to figure out how colliders on tilemaps worked. Composite Collider 2D, such an easy fix.

Tomorrow's task is going to be a bit more complicated. I'll be making Prefabs for my NPCs and Enemies and scripting them to move at each other and "Attack".

I'm also going to set aside some time to go through the suggested screenshot programs so I can start showing some images.

I actually found a bunch of assets that really fit the aesthetic I wanted. I got them all from https://assetstore.unity.com/publishers/43166. 

Thanks for the link though, those assets looked good.

This will be my first game jam and (hopefully) my first complete game. 

After looking at a couple other dev logs I realized I had the same idea as a few other people, but hopefully mine has a fun original twist.

My game will be 2D top-down sprite animation style. You player has a healer in a typical MMO group and your objective is to keep your party alive. The fun part is that your party sucks and you constantly have to be running around, scrambling to keep them alive. DPS is in the fire again, tank forgot to switch specs, etc. 

Since I'm awful at art and sound design, I'll be looking at some assets I can use either here or on the Unity asset store. I wanted to do this one solo because I'll be working my normal job a lot for the next two weeks and I didn't want to disappoint a teammate if I couldn't fully commit to this jam.

The plan for today is to complete my Design Doc and plan my dev schedule.  

Tomorrow I'll look for assets, get my player moving and have a playtest area built.