
Game Name : TBA

Premise : A turn-based strategy RPG. Stripped down to just combat sections, no 'RPG'-ing bits inbetween fights. The 'alone' twist is instead of the usual party of characters - which is where I'd admit, makes a lot of it fun... You just play one single character. Main draw of inspiration for this is the 'Shining Force' series of games.


LOG

6pm-8pm - Deciding on idea. Stuck with the whole 'alone' thing, wanted to do antithesis. In the end though, the idea I have will be simpler version of the same, so more likely to 'get done'.

8pm-10pm - Getting to grips with Unity

10pm-12pm - Have a generated 'board' grid working, with gridobjects... Have more of a handle on Unity and the environment now. Still tons to do.

12pm-1.15am - Grid 'walking' working, with highlighting drawn. Stuck for a while on an amateur recursive problem... :-/

1.15am-3.00am - Flagging... Dealt with some odd Unity file locking problems. Cleaned up my player stuff a little, and have mouse picking and an action menu showing. Hoping to do action area picking before I get some sleep.

3.00am - 4.10am - End of this session. Going to get some sleep now. I got action and aoe area stuff done, but I need to do the UI logic inbetween still. Worried that this stuff will be painful to redo again when I do the AI work. Spent a lot of this time fiddling with camera lerping too... I was just fudging attempts, rather than debugging 'properly'. Need a fresh head for tomorrow.


Plan for the next session tomorrow to get full turns working. Also want the enemies on the playfield with some limited logic (they don't need to do anything, just sit there). Can then do hitpoint stuff, and have combat working. Have to at least have that done in my second stretch. The third hopefully will be procedural gen, art and polish... But that's likely way too much work. I certainly will have to scale this back. Possibly I ditch items? Agh. I should just sleep.



11:30am - Woke at about 10am. Watched the first half of Everton vs Norwich. (Part-time Norwich fan, I went to college/uni there)... Got showered, and now back to work...

11.30am-1.10pm - Enemy system basics in. Basic stats in. Reworking the primitive testing turn stuff I did; which I should have planned and done right first time last night. Want to abstract so the player uses the UI, and the enemy uses some AI code. Gunning for 6pm (the halfway point) for the game being playable with back-and-forth turns. I think it's doable!

1.10pm - 3.45pm - Turn logic pretty much there for human players. Placeholder states for animations in. Setup nicely to write the AI code. Just want to see the AI doing 'thinking', but no work now. Going at this rate I'll have about two hours to get my first pass enemy AI stuff written. Also need to do battle logic too. Will be a close one, but I'm happy I'm making at least steady progress.

3:45pm - 4.45pm - Decided to jump to the other meaty part I haven't done yet: Items, magic and levelling. Doing good so far, my worry though is around serialization. I want to save this stuff off, but I've not worked with that stuff before, even in straight C#. Going to get this all working, and then plod on with attacking. I think I'll slip the 6pm deadline for having both sides attacking, but I think I'll get the player attacking some idle enemies.

4.45pm - 5.40pm - Yeah, going to slip it for sure. Happy I have a lot of forward-thinking stuff done, but I'm delaying the 'wow' moment when I can actually battle. I need to get it done before 8pm. Undecided so far on sleep plans. I want to work up to the 6pm tomorrow and just collapse afterwards... So I'll probably nap downstairs (where I work) at some point, perhaps just when I feel mistakes are creeping in and tiredness is over me.

5.40pm - 6.50pm - Agh. Hitting a real block. :( Was stuck on a couple of really silly bugs. The last one I fixed was when I moved a local variable into a member variable, I forgot to remove the local declaration... So the member didn't ever get changed. :( Think I have these quoshed now though. I'm not so sure it was wise adding AOE support. But I guess it's done now. Right now you can do magic attacks. I need to write the math for 'proper' attacks with weapons. After that I'll either do item/magic UI picking, or the AI.

6.50pm - 8.23pm - Damn, my initial flurry from this morning has really slowed. I'm doing more tedious tasks now though. I decided to do the UI element stuff, hp/mp bars. My biggest hurdles I think in the past few hours have been niggly c# bugs that I haven't been able to debug quickly. I miss a proper 'const'... Also the reference vs. value stuff has bit me with the Enemy generation code. Oh well. My new personal target is to have a battle playable from start to end by midnight. I'm not sure how good the AI will be; I can see the ranged stuff being tough to get right. I'll need to abuse the 'highlighter' stuff further, which I wish I did completely differently now. Oh well.

Oh, also need to do a wishlist before I sleep this evening. Boil down *everything* I need to do, and prioritize it.

8.25pm - 9.10pm - Random comment. I keep finding multiple ways of accessing my data and components in Unity... Sometimes I add helpers, sometimes I remember I have the helpers. Sometimes I don't... Whilst I'm a little embarrased that we have to submit the source, I'm sure there's going to be few entries with beautiful code. :)

9:17pm - w00t! Cleared my first battle. Killed off two wisps and a slime. :)

10:00pm - Hmmm. Working on UI now. I think I may try and burn through all the UI stuff left to do. Have to have magic and item selection, and I also want to do a 'shop'. This also leads me on to pre-post battle screens, and a mainmenu. Agh! I'm worried that I haven't started on the AI still, though. I'm trying to tell myself that's the fun bit, and I'm getting the tedious stuff out the way. We'll see!

11:00pm - Magic and item sel done. and I'll use the same code for the shop. Decided to go for gold/exp/levelling up next. Poss also the 'battle end' condition check too.

12:30- Man, really made a pigs ear of so much of this code. Now looking at how status' popup and say that 'you killed ***'. I timed them. I should really make them click-through. I can't being to think of the amount of changes this might mean! :(

1.00am - Feel like the player control has more polish now. Exp and gold stuff all working. Something new now, will think on it. Going for a cuppa. My back is hurting. Too much standing, too much sitting awkwardly in this stool!

1.15am - Going to put in some sound effects next. For a change of pace. Need some bloody content. :)

2.00am - SFX going well. Have most of the SFX I want, barring a few I just wrote down. Tempted to give particles a quick go after. I did want to try something for the attack animations, particularly magic: flame, frost, etc... There's music also to look at. I'm having a second wind, so if I continue with these, I'll try and finish them. Maybe SFX + music by 3am? Can but hope. :)

2.15am - Fuck! If you drag items when Unity is 'playing', it forgets them... I knew this, but it's the first time I've been bitten by it for more than simple operations. I dragged all those sounds over one-by-one! :-/

2.55am - Doing character icons now. :) Just did the three test guys. No idea if these will be final. I'm liking trying the stuff I haven't yet. If only just so I know it works. The audio stuff was a suprise and took me a while to grok how to get simple sounds playing. The rendering stuff was pretty easy when I tinkered yesterday with the proc-gen checkerboard texture stuff, so getting the icons in shouldn't be too much of a bind.

3.15am - Diversity helps! Icons all working. Looking nice too, alpha cutouts working! I gave the web player a go too, since it's probably been over 24hrs since the last time. All good. Still at 60! Brought in the view a little too, which I think makes it look better. I'm glad I have done this sort of thing now, rather than at like 3pm tomorrow! Going to continue with this sort of thing... Finish off the SFX, and get some music in. Also poss. placeholder voiceovers, since I wanted to get the wife in it. Will be nice to just tune the enemy AI, and general populating the battlefield nearer the end... Still need the shop in there! Agh, so many things to do. 

I *may* pull an all nighter. I think a nap may foul me up, I'll either sleep too long... Or I'll wake up groggy, miserable and out of it.

3.30am - Uploaded it to my webspace and tested it on the wife's lower-end laptop. Runs fine! Will need to remember to check out the submission page before it gets too close. I'm avoiding the LD website, because I don't want to see a bunch of masterpieces and lose my drive to get this done. :)

4.15am - Filled in all magic spells with costs and other values, and levelling up table with them. Fun to nuke things with the Level 4 bolt when testing. :)

5.00am - Gettin' shit done, yo!

5.30am - Just wrote up my list of TODO items. Fits on one notepad! :) Some are straightforward; some are known quantities, but require some good time... Some are unknowns. I looked at the LD submission page and it's real simple. Just need a screenshot, and a blurb. I'll upload the web player version to my webspace, and the source there too.

Cup of tea, methinks.

6.10am - Got my music generated. ~2mb MP3's each, they take ages to be processed by Unity. I also have to toggle off the 3D option, which takes ages again! Need to make sure I save the project! Will be getting this working, then braving that AI. 

3/4 thru point!

7.00am - Music all working. Been working on other small polish items too. Only have music crossed off my little notepad so far. AI next, honest. :)

7.15am - Started it! Breaking now for something to eat and drink in front of the football. Not for too long. Want to also jot some strategies for the AI.

8.00am - Break was longer than I thought it'd be. Good news is that I have some solid AI plans. I primarily just want it solid. The things move and attach correctly; have plans for some searching agression, and a bit of randomness. I have three initial AI types I'd flag enemies as. Right now I'll just test each individually. I want to 'generate' the enemies, positions and AI types on a map eventually; I've never planned to design levels for this game.

8.30am - Glad I didn't abuse the Highlight stuff again to do the AI. :) Close to being able to test what I've coded up. CPU can make the smart choice between a magic, ranged and melee attack. Something comes to mind, it'd be nice to switch AI to force to ranged if they get too injured... I think though that the type of enemies will rarely be hybrid. Ranged will always try and keep the biggest distance when attacking. Anyways, lets see. Wonder if I get creamed on my first try by those 4 AI guys? :)

It's damn cold in here. I'm shivering...! Keeps me awake I suppose. I'm going to be a mess come the post 6pm submit. Will just collapse. Only 9.5 hours to go. That's about an hour per feature, which is much faster that I've been going so far! :(

9.30am - AI works! Works great. :) Even added a couple of new enemies to test the magic. Found an easy to fix bug right away - The AI could cast spells from really far away! Now just want to do the agressive AI, and the random one, and I'm done! Biggest risk feature done. Fooking awesome!!

10.30am - No idea why I keep hitting the on-hours and half hours. I've got the AI done now, I actually didn't do seperate behaviors I did tweakable gradient values instead. 'Agressiveness' and 'RandomMovementChance' ... or named something like that. I also made the picking of move positions random, since it was based off the highlight generation before. Which meant enemies would always sidle up in the same order when melee attacking you.

Now I'm going to work on the mainmenu/win/lose and shop menu. Aim is for skeleton first, then I make it pretty after. Less than eight hours left. My workrate has slowed recently, but I'm at least not making mistakes.

11.30am - Plodding on with the UI. Reworked BattleManager finally. Have a nice mainmenu. I really hate working on UI.

Visual Assist (and/or VS itself) is starting to play up and draw real slowly. :(

1pm - Less updates. More work needs doing! On the plus side, the UI, shop, pre/post battle screens are all done. No more UI to do. Less than 5 hours to go. Unfortunately have an AI bug I've noticed where attacks aren't quite right. It's not predictable.

2pm - Spent nearly an hour on save/load support. Appears to work great, but I may regret doing it... Want to test the Unity Player on the Mrs' PC again

Next? I think level generation. Last major part. After that it's all polish work.

2.15pm - Works fine. The package is 16mb now with all the music. It still loads pretty quickly from my webspace.



Music:

(between breaks when the missus comes down and watches TV)

Best Rock Album in the World I - 2 cds
Best Rock Album in the World II - 2 cds
Soundgarden - Superunknown
Manic Street Preachers - The Holy Bible
Oasis - Definitely Maybe
Aerosmith - Greatest hits
Nirvana - Nevermind
The Mull Historical Society - Loss
The Bluetones - Return to the Last Chance Saloon
Sonic Youth - Daydream Nation
Badly Drawn Boy - Have you fed the fish?
Chemical Brothers - Dig Your Own Hole
Jane's Addiction - Strays
Pulp - Different Class
