Naturalchemy (super early WIP)

Here it  is, my submission for MiniJam 14 ! No big description here as it is far from being actually complete and fully playable, but more of a small post mortem about my first experience (hopefully first of many) at jamming. 

First, credits. I used 2 bases for my sprites (I did some alterations and some variants to adjust for my uses) :

https://thkaspar.itch.io/micro-character-bases
https://0x72.itch.io/16x16-dungeon-tileset

So what I was not able to do first :

Implement ANY of the gameplay mechanic I wanted. The main idea was to have this little goblin be able to gather the fountains you can see around the level to have magical essences of the four elements (air, earth, fire, water) and be able to combine 2 of them to make a throwable bottle with a special power each. My WIP document for combinations looked like this :

Air + Fire : Spreading fire/Molotov
Air + Water : Freezing cloud
Air + Earth : Rock frag?
Fire + Water : Steam trap (forces enemies back while dealing minor damage, enemies don't try to get around it)
Fire + Earth : Lava pool (highly damaging but does not force enemies back)
Water + Earth : Slowing mud

At some point I considered an Iceberg blocking the way in corridors for Air + Earth (air pretty much worked as air and cold at the same time for my combinations).

While this would have been doable, I unfortunately knew right from the get go I would be able to only use about 48 hours of the jam, so I knew I wouldn't be able to finish, I just wanted to prove to myself what I could do in such a limited timeframe. 

Of course the finality for a jam game was to pretty much have some small wave based gameplay, probably having waves set on a timer (so you'd have to rush to gather resources but without completely avoiding enemies or risking being overwhelmed in the process).

The silver lining/What I could do :

I was still able to do a lot for a very first experience with a game jam. I edited the micro character base to have a dying animation and a backward facing set. I also edited the dungeon tileset to have new animated fountains, new flags (unseen in the build sadly) and most importantly the walls.

The thing I'm the most hapy with is how I solved the issue of a 3/4 view wall like this. When the player is behind the wall, with the normal walls he would be hidden. Instead of making it transparent or using a time consuming masking solution, I decided to use broken walls so we could still partially see the player and still be able to tell where he is.

I also was able to code in a pretty fluid movement system that I'm pretty happy with. The speed is probably not what I would have settled with but the general feel is what I was after.

Lastly I was able to completely map the player's animator for every action (and also had a code to test it), I just didn't implement the proper animation switch with the final movement (although it was just a matter of checking the current action and comparing the movement to the last frame).

What I learned :

Honestly a lot. I enhanced my skills with Unity development. I also enhanced my spriting skills (after all editing makes you realize what works and what doesn't). And I also learned to be prepared. I lost a whole 4 hours to installs. I had to update Visual Studio 2017 because it somehow had horrendous performances and I also had a bug with a plugin in Unity that forced me to switch to the latest stable 2018 release. While I was still able to a small bit of things done during those, it was really little. The installs were eating up the whole of my one and only 7200 HDD and doing anything was a slug.

What's next :

I want to enter the JamCraft 2 and since the theme is pretty fitting and it started BEFORE the MiniJam I'll probably use this as a base for it. I really want to finish that up and polish it a bit so I think this is the chance to do it !

Available controls :

Keyboard arrows : Move the character

WARNING
The build is only available for Windows because it's still super simple and not finished, Once I polish it for the JamCraft 2 I will obviously make Mac and Linux builds ;)