The Great Devlog

Introduction

Hi, I'm Ciccino and in this Devlog we will see together step by step my mistakes and how I managed my first game jam. 

Foreword: I'm sorry for my possible grammatical errors, but English is not my native language.

Day 1

The first day the "Ecosystem" theme had just been released and the first idea I thought of was a video game based on the birth of life, in which the various levels of evolution were shown with diversified gameplay based on the level. But... maybe that was a little too off theme and it probably wouldn't have been fun.

The second idea was to make a much simpler video game than the first, it should have been a very simple RPG in which you identify yourself as a street sweeper who has to clean up the dirt left by passers-by, maintaining the balance of the ecosystem.

The third and final idea, the one that convinced me more than the others, is a video game that takes up the concept of evolution of the first one, but makes it simpler and more fun (in my opinion).

My goal was to play an endless game where the main objective was to climb the hierarchical pyramid of the lake ecosystem, thus paying attention to predators, which change according to the stage of evolution in which you are.

I don't know if you know that feeling where you have everything in mind and imagine in your head (spoiler: it won't be the same). So in order to not lose my fantastic thoughts, I transferred them to a sheet of paper. 

sorry for my terrible drawings

OK, now I just had to start working!

Day 2

The player moves, he eat and he can be eaten, a great start!

For my sprites I used 8-bit painter.

Day 3

Added the score and te hunger bar.

Day 4

Now the enemy has 2d pathfinding, nice!

Day 5

Useless day! Added scene transition, but then i realised i couldn't manage a big area like this!

Day 6/7/8

I didn't reach big goals, so I'll skip that part.

Last day

Added enemy spawner, main menu, game over screen and tested for a long time, worked all the day until 4 am! 

Unfortunately, my sounds didn't worked when I built the game, but I'm really satisfied.

What I learned

Thanks to this game jam I was able to make my first game and improve myself exponentially, here's what I learned:

-To make a hierarchical scale as in my case, the layers come to our aid, which by comparing them based on their number allow us to save a lot of time.

How to compare them:

if (other.gameObject.layer > gameObject.layer && other.gameObject.CompareTag("Player"))

Also added the tag so the fish didn't eat each other.

-If you don't know how to do something, don't linger on it, but go ahead, you will find the solution later.

-While implementing a new game mechanic, do things one at a time and not all at once, so you can solve small problems one by one calmly, so they don't add up all together into one huge problem.