Got migraine. Missed jam deadline for the first time (although they're allowing late submission so I'll still count it as a success).

All I managed today was some planning because ow. But still, technically not a zero day.

Apparently the organisers got the jam end date wrong, so hooray another day!

Rough day today so I didn't get much done, the deadline extension was definitely a godsend. Did manage some dialogue and a few other bits, but broadly I would sum up today as "blergh".

Hopefully soon I get to the point where I know enough to be able to accurately scope a game jam project. But it is not this day.

Essentially now I'm just seeing what there's time for. The bf took some time off work so I'm just jamming in between our other activities and if it doesn't get finished then sod it, there's more important things.

Today I managed an intro cutscene, improvements to the (rough as hell) day / night cycle, work on the camera, and other bits and bobs. Still need to finish off the game ending sequence, and I want to customise the environment a bit depending on choices the player made early in their journey.

Should be able to get something halfway decent submitted. That's as optimistic as I dare be at this point...

Chugging along today as per, nothing dramatic to report but just ticking things off the list. Tomorrow I need to work on my start and end cutscenes, and write some more dialogue.

Technically there are other features I'd wanted to put in, but meh. Currently too warm to be bothered about those, we'll see if that changes tomorrow!

This was a low effort post after a high effort day. I deserve a break :p

The deadline is on Saturday night. My main personal deadline to get most of it done is tomorrow night.

There are 38 things on the list. FML.

Today I did manage to figure out some camera stuff, model a couple extra bits, and generally started ticking things off the aforementioned list. Even made a custom shader! But there's a long way to go tomorrow. Wish me luck!

Ugh, today was annoying. I got hardly anything done due to shaders being incomprehensible and every single tutorial I tried to follow being out of date or just plain broken.

I even talked to a member of Unity's shader graph programming team and she agreed it's all gibberish unless you know a ton of maths and that they don't really have good resources on it. So, I guess shaders aren't for me!

Need to find an alternative way of making things look decent tomorrow, since I can't find any suitable shaders to download either. Bleh.

Most of a day lost there, I am not impressed.

Also a giant cog, and a bridge and a signpost, and a lot of rocks. Really getting on with Blender now I've found a suitable style. It's kind of ass in terms of interface, but once you have some hotkeys memorised it gets a lot better.

So that was today, just making a ton of assets. Tomorrow will probably be about halfy half assets and actual coding, I need to start on the low hanging fruit like putting in start / end screens and whatnot.

Already starting to plot what sort of thing I might make for the next jam. I think I have a problem.

Almost forgot to update tonight, but that's what the phone alarms are for! Yes, alarms plural, because I'm easily distracted.

Not much progress to report today because Sunday. I made a plan for the week ahead, and did a very small amount of modelling in Blender. Need to wrap my head around how to make things at the correct scale, but for now I'm proud of my clumsy attempts.

Lots of progress planned for tomorrow so let's hope it actually works out that way!

Stayed up late last night trying to solve issues with my camera movement, failed, got about two hours sleep then woke up and immediately fixed it. Who knows!

Of course, it's the weekend so I didn't get a whole lot of time to work on anything other than that. I've made a start on a generic cloaked pixel art fella but don't know if it'll end up being usable or not. Just another thing I need to learn how to do, funtimes!

The plan is to take it easy and get an early night tonight, then worry about everything tomorrow instead. The jam deadline seemed ages away when it was midnight on Saturday, but now my effective deadline is midnight Thursday it seems alarmingly close D:

I mean it's technically progress.

Today is a nightmare of camera scripts, sudden bugs and unanswered questions, and I just found out I'll have two days less to finish Rainbow Jam than expected. Honestly I don't even know how to approach half the stuff left on the todo list, but whatevs. That's the best way to learn!

No super secret screenshot today because of the complete lack of progress, but I promise to include one tomorrow ;)

Went down an absolute YouTube rabbit hole today in my quest to learn competent 3d modelling in a week.

It's going ok, I figured out how to make a low poly mountain and import it to Unity, and when my alarm went off to make this update I was halfway through updating my dialogue-based player movement system to use Sebastian Lague's path creator tool instead of just moving in straight lines.

There's a lot of modelling still to do, but not a huge amount of coding. The whole point of this project was to try and make something without complicated gameplay and with more of a focus on the environment and general vibe, so I have most of a week to polish up my Blender skills and make some suitable stuff.

Tomorrow I need to make some decisions on the look of the player character, which I've been dreading. But it needs doing before the jam officially hits the halfway point, so tomorrow it is.

Edit: Apparently we're attaching exclusive sneak peeks here. Behold a 3d scene with absolutely no problems whatsoever.

First time properly trying to model something useful in Blender, in this case trees.

First time making a day / night cycle.

First time playing with 3d lighting.

First time in ages I've been drunk on a weeknight.

Good day today!

Finished off the majority of my dialogue system so now the player can navigate the world by choosing dialogue prompts. Learned how to make and switch between custom skyboxes, and started on a weather system that changes per location visited. Also got some first draft files from my music guy.

Other than that, ate leftover pizza and somehow managed to distract half of the Rainbow Jam server with wrestling talk, converted another person to Git instead of harddrive backups, and also had a tiny nap. Success!

Meh I say. Am not feeling well so getting anything done today was like pulling teeth. I did sort out my navigation system and get most of the way there with a simple dialogue system for the Rainbow Jam game though, so that's something.

My teammate for the upcoming Unexpected Jam has now dropped out, which is sad because we were going to make a point and click adventure and it sounded really fun! Hopefully I can find another team but if not...eh...

Me and a guy I met in another jam server are hunting around for a small, chill, gamedev (not a specific game jam) related Discord to call home so we're flitting from one to another saying hello and hoping to find one that isn't spammy and full of kids. If anyone has any suggestions, do let me know!

People lied.

It's Sunday so not a huge amount of time to work on anything today, but I am piecing together a sort of "what I need to learn" list for the 3D prototype I'm working on for Rainbow Jam (yes I started another game jam, shush). It's a long list.

This might be the one that breaks my 100% jam success record, but it should at least teach me a lot even if I can't get it finished in time. I'm hoping to make heavy use of Cinemachine's state camera, so currently playing with that. Then I'm building out the physical structure of the game with scriptable objects (I promise this does make sense), and then since the actual gameplay is very simple it's mostly going to be learning some Blender and content writing.

Excite.

Had a bit of a chill day today. Discovered and fixed another bug with the jam demo, and tidied up its Itch page a bit.

Then I chatted to a few people and picked someone to work with for the Unexpected Jam that starts in a couple weeks. We'll be making a point and click, and my teammate is a young woman so that's nice to see more lasses taking their first steps into dev. She's in the US so timezones don't match up perfectly but eh, it should be fine.

So, between now and then I have free time to work on other things. I also have a lot of knitting and cross stitch to catch up with, and a fantasy football league to set up, so dev updates will be more minor for a while. All things in moderation, and so on.

Most of today was spent chilling and recovering from recent game jam madness, and of course doing actual real life things.

But I also spent a couple of hours in the afternoon fixing the couple of gamebreaking bugs that remained in my demo, and getting the new version live on Itch.

Feeling good, it's in the top half of submissions in terms of the popularity algorithm and has had some really nice comments and feedback. Feeling quite motivated to turn it into a real game.

Got two hours sleep this morning after the jam deadline, and then spent the entire rest of today trying to make my game demo actually work as intended!

It's not quite there, but people are managing to play through it ok so that's the main thing. The jam community are great and everyone is very supportive, and some of them are incredibly talented too judging by the submissions list! It's gonna take a while to go through and play all the ones that look interesting.

There's still a lot of polish and bugfixing to do before even this basic demo is up to scratch, and then I've had a couple of requests to make more levels so that'll be first on my list.

Then, finally, back to my actual main project for a bit! Phew.

Well, the I Can't Write jam has been very up and down for me, but I'm happy to report I managed to submit something.

The something is a buggy proof of concept with placeholder art, but that's just the longer definition of "jam game".

It's currently past 5am and I've been working flat out all day and night to get something finished. My hands are cramping and it's difficult to type, so I'll leave more updates til tomorrow. Still don't regret abandoning the visual novel, though!

Behold a thing: https://teahands.itch.io/everyday-grind

Ok so "no idea" is a bit of an exaggeration, but not by much. God knows how to tag this thing on Itch.

Got a lot of good work done today, but there's still a ton to do. Luckily since this is a newb-friendly jam, the host is constantly reminding us that we're allowed to submit late. I'm gonna try not to do that, but it's nice to know the option is there.

Today I added most of the remaining gameplay features, plus music, sound effects and some better pixel art to my mystery game. Tomorrow...well, there's a lot to do let's just leave it at that.

Also I'm getting tired tonight and writing far too many "else if" things. It's definitely not right, but it's Saturday night and idgaf.

Got on with my new project for this jam today, having well and truly discarded the visual novel. I can't quite figure out exactly what sort of game it's going to end up being, I'm building it out based on a general feel I'd like it to have rather than based on systems I've designed. We'll see how that goes.

Already learned more in the last two days than I did in a week and a half working in Ren'Py. Although I am glad I tried it, and gained a passing familiarity with Python. You never know when that might come in handy.

Thought I'd missed the deadline last night, but apparently this site is in some bizarro timezone and doesn't change day until 10am my time. This is useful knowledge.

Update: Apparently that only goes for Daily Gamedev, not Decade Jam. So one streak continues, one broken. Woe.

So, after all that tedious waffle about my visual novel over the last few days, and after finally settling down with it and starting to make serious progress, and after basically being done except for making more art, I asked myself an important question: "Since it turns out I strongly dislike to play visual novels, why am I forcing myself to make one?"

Instead of deciding between finishing the VN and dropping out of the I Can't Write jam, I realised there was still a mystery option C) scrap everything and start again and build a whole game in four days.

That's still longer than a lot of jams, so I should be able to get something out despite being a nubcake.

So yesterday morning I sat down at a new Unity project thinking about what story I wanted to tell, and how to do it without having much (or maybe any) characterisation and text. And I'm loving it! Working on the VN was like pulling teeth, but working on my stupid little abstract representation of a real life situation? Funtimes!

Just have to figure out how to include a duck in it somewhere...

Edited with progress from the 8th:

Got on with my new project for this jam today, having well and truly discarded the visual novel. I can't quite figure out exactly what sort of game it's going to end up being, I'm building it out based on a general feel I'd like it to have rather than based on systems I've designed. We'll see how that goes.

Already learned more in the last two days than I did in a week and a half working in Ren'Py. Although I am glad I tried it, and gained a passing familiarity with Python. You never know when that might come in handy.

See above.

Good day today after yesterday's crisis. I've figured out a new data structure for the visual novel project, and split my work time today between fleshing out the characters and making more art.

Finishing seems achievable now, but there's just so much art left to do. So my updates for the rest of the week might end up pretty samey unless I give specifics.

Today's art: an anthropomorphic duck character drawn with swappable poses and expressions. As you do.

This morning I almost abandoned the visual novel project, and had decided to quit the "I can't write" game jam. The project just isn't exciting me, and Ren'Py is being difficult, so I thought it might be time to move on.

However, after a bit of a pep talk and some advice from a Ren'Py veteran I've decided to stick with it and at least get something submitted.

To that end, most of today was spent rethinking my implementation plan to fit within the limitations of the engine, and making and implementing custom UI graphics. The next couple of days will be make or break on this project, so fingers crossed!