Devlog Day 1

Planning and Level Design  

First day of Mini Jame Gam, our very first GameJam, and first time ever designing a game
The day started when the event began, at 13:00 our time. Theme was Reality is Breaking, and the special object a phone

We started out brainstorming ideas, and came up with about 10 different ideas. We picked the very last one, thinking that it was worth putting more effort into. 

The initial idea was that the player character would hit his head and afterwards wake up in some kind of cave. Here he finds out that nothing really is what it seems, and that there are places that he can go that looks like cant, and places that looks like he cant go, but can. We wanted to incoorperate the phone by making some mysterious guy call our main character, telling him the directions to get to the exit, and then you would have to remember which ways to go. Luckily, we quickly realised that this kind of gameplay is not very fun, and that we should try to rethink everything. Now, we kept our idea about taking the theme of "Reality" very literally in that we thought of it as our day to day lives, and what feels real to us, and that the "Breaking" meant that everything around our player character get's a new meaning. We also kept the idea about some guy calling our player character with tips. 

Instead of the memory game that was our initial idea, this new idea would be a gridbased system, where things around our player character (The things that are "breaking") would define where he would be able to go, in order to reach the next level. We then went straight to setting up rules for these items.

Read our other dev log on level design if any of that interests you at all.  

We decided that our playarea would be a box consisting of 19x11 tiles, and that we would be using sprites that were 16x16 pxl. Large. Quite small, and we soon kind of regretted that choice, but it did make for quicker sprite design  

As the last thing we did, we set up a trello board to track anything we wanted to do, and any bugs we would find along the way.  

Programming  

After finishing our level design, one of up began setting up our Unity project. First he started out learning about the Gridbased system and tilemaps, as well as learning more about developing character movement for a gridbased game.

After finishing all of that he went on to creating boundaries for where the player could go, and here we stumbled upon this bug, which was quite funny:  

This could easily be used in some other kind of project, so maybe we'll hold onto that.  

Art  

For our art we simply used Paint.NET to make our different sprites in the game. In one way, this worked well for us, as it can do more or less what we wanted it to, but at the same time it is quite annoying for making pixel art, when you dont want to use Anti-Aliasing.  

The first thing we did was creating some assets for using when programming. Just the blue tiles as well as the player that you could see in the video above.

Afterwards, one of us started on the Tilemap. We found a nice color palette from Lospec.com  and used many of the colors from it, though we did edit some of them to make our art seem more smooth, We did not want the individual pixels to stand out, but instead wanted to make the grout between the tiles stand out, making it easier for our player to navigate and control. This is something we quickly learned, after making our first tileset. Less is more!

The first tileset here looked good while we made it, but as soon as we saw it in the game, it made it really hard to navigate and very confusing as well, and we chose to edit it, and we were much happier about the second one.

The tilemap took much longer than we anticipated, but when we were done, it was nice to finally have something finished.  

End of day 1  

We saw our tilemap fully working inside of our unity project, and we were able to walk around in the world. Everything looked good so far, and we were happy about our idea and the progress for the day.