Day Two - First Movement, Basic UI and Refactoring

Already two days in, things are making progress. As much learning you can gain from two or three day jams, I feel, I really enjoy the ten days time scale of this one, as it allows you to create a proper game with some lasting results for your own toolkit.

I spent most of the time in getting into level design. I'm not really proficient in this, although I own a huge library of Synty assets to play with. One of the goals of this project is to change that, but yet it shows, how long it takes to make a rather small outdoor level after all. Ok, it has two interaction sceneries as well and I can corner cut a lot with silouhettes in the distance, but as I plan for another, much bigger one, I need to plan to create some meta prefabs for that before continuing to that eventually.

Speaking of unplanned, I spontanously added a compas bar at the top of the screen, which took way more time to create than expected. Not the technical implementation, which turned out quite simple, but creating the necessary asset, using the chosen font for the game. Anyway, I'm very happy with the result and will add it to my crawler tools.

With coming closer to the end of the jam day - reading, approching the 18:00 starting time again - I discovered, that I need to refactor the way I handle scenes in my crawler toolkit. Ok, let's stay positive, this will improve the kit drastically, but the timing to learn about that with the jam running gives me some concerns, thanking the ancient ones, that this jam last for ten and not two days. I'm quite optimistic to get the necessary changes done, before the jam day shifts.

So, what's the plan for "tomorrow" - aka tonight? I urgently need to finish the starting map, including its game play. With that, the mansion needs to be set up to at least the point, where I can reach the library in some kind of block out and I need to create an early block out for the big swamp map, as it defines the real scope of the game eventually. As I need to work next week, the evenings are already blocked with finishing the swamp map, leaving friday and saturday for the smaller dungeons. As they all will have similar biomes and it is easter weekend, I guess I will go into full jam mode then without much sleep, but I feel, this project is worth it.