Well, it's over. GMTK Jam 2022 has come and gone, though at the time of writing the results are still pending.

Not that I expect much from my entry this year, but I am quite fond of how my game, Super Dice Dogs Battle Arena, came out. Admittedly the uploaded version is more of a toy-- a proof of concept, more than an actual 'game'. There's no strategy, no real challenge. Simply drag n dropping "Dice Dogs" or troops onto the arena and watching them fight another team of dice dogs. 

It's cute, which was the main point of feedback I received. But there really wasn't much to it. Why? For a few reasons. First off, I was a team of one. Not too many of my friends are into game development,  and I just didn't feel like teaming up with people I didn't know. At least not this year. 

Secondly, I didn't spend as much time working on it as I could have. Sure I spent over 24hrs on it, but even that is on the high end of my estimated time on it. Friday night when the jame started, I went to a Death Cab for Cutie concert with my sister. She had won tickets via a local radio station and was looking for someone to go with her. I volunteered, forgetting the date coincided with the first night of the jam. When I realized it, it was too late. I also wanted to go and spend time with my sister who I don't get to spend time with much these days. This, however, become beneficial to my personal success in the jam (even though I ended up being one of the lowest rated games). I also slept quite a bit both nights. I'm turning into an old man at the age of 32.

But what about the time I actually spent on the game? Well when the theme was first announced, I felt a little lucky, to be honest, because about a week or so before I had been messing around with a prototype that helped me quite a bit in the early stages. The idea was for a platformer in which the player controls a block of jello that rolls around.  The controls weren't great and the camera sucked and I decided to put it aside for the time being, but I liked the idea of a cube-shaped creature rolling around, and I had another game I had been working on and off for almost two years that was in need of something interesting. I brought over the cube, made up a dog texture in Affinity Photo and reworked the code to work on random rolls. (pun not intended)

There were going to be tiles that you would land on that could randomly move you back to start or move you past an obstacle. That was a horrendous idea.

So I was primed for this jam from the start, however, my first idea became a dead end. It was initially a rolling puzzle, which was not too dissimilar from what others had submitted. Except mine would've sucked and not been fun at all. Going to the concert had given me time to think about my game. At first I tried coming up with creative puzzles or mechanics that I thought few others would think of. Probably not a great mindset, but I didn't want to just make a shit version of a game that everyone else had made. I prefer to be different and stand out, if I can. I think I nailed that when I decided to pivot.

You may recognize these dorks... I mean dogs. I swear they're not meant to be "Sanics", though I am aware of the similarities. 

I'm admittedly not into simulation games all that much. I played Goat Simulator (not really a simulation game but whatever), but outside of the that I'd struggle to mention  a single other game I've played in that genre. That said, TABS, Totally Accurate Battle Simulator popped into my head. Don't know why, considering I had never touched it and had only ever seen screenshots, but I thought the idea of cute little dice dogs battling each other with swords and bows and arrows was a cute enough idea to try out. I modeled a sword in Blender, attached it to a dice dog and wrote some code for them to roll toward each other. It worked and it was a beautiful mess. The rolls weren't perfect, they couldn't do or take damage yet, and there was and still is no actual swing of a sword, but it didn't matter. It made me giggle, and I had fun throwing in more and more dogs into the fight.

I had an idea I liked and a direction to move in. I worked on the code for combat, added two more classes, Archer and Mage, pitted them all in an arena setting. And then I slept for 6 hours. OOPS!

The next day was all about implementing new ideas and improving on what had already been done, but consider that I'm not that smart and I don't have great time management skills, it took all day to get the game into a playable state. And then I slept for another 8 hours. DOUBLE OOPS!

I had only intended on getting four or five hours, but I set my alarm to the wrong time. It was Sunday and I barely had a game. Didn't have a main menu or anything. The rest of the time I had I spent on implementing the main menu, pause menu, volume settings, and a horrid controls UI at the bottom of the screen. I didn't have time to add any form of strategy or puzzle, there was only one type of enemy and the camera was REALLY bad. I mean you can test it yourself. Sure it's not horrendous, but it's really not that good. I also decided to package up the game into an installer. I know now that's not a great idea and may have affected how many people played my game. 

I honestly didn't know, I was going off an old Brackeys tutorial and thought that was common place in the indie game dev scene. I'm a still a newbie, despite having worked on multiple failed and dropped projects in Unity for the past 7 years or so. I'll probably reupload the game so it's a zip file download, but I can't rebuild for webGL. I don't have that version of the game anymore (more on that in a bit).

Despite all those flaws and errors ( the volume settings don't work in the Pause Menu), I liked what I had put together. I shared it with some friends after uploading and submission (luckily got it in before the site broke down), and they gave me positive feedback on the game and some ideas on improvements. It certainly got me excited and even though I had already planned on uploading a fixed version after the jam ended, the feedback I received pushed me work on this until I have an actual got-damn game. 

I became so excited in fact that, after a well-needed shower, I continued to work on the game as I watched the discord freak out over Itch going down. I've continued to work on it every day the past week. I refactored some bad code, reworked how the game was structured in Unity, replaced the camera with a MUCH better version, added some more sound effects,  made some UI changes, and over all started make it a better foundation to build off of. 

And that leads us up to now. I have some exciting ideas for SDDBA, and I hope you will join me in my journey to a full release. I will try to update this dev log as much as possible  and may upload a video from time to time. If you played Super Dice Dogs, thank you. If you gave me feedback, thank you. If you read this... thank you. This past week has been an up for me at a time when my personal life seems to be spiraling down a drain.

I appreciate you. <3

You can see the improved camera in this video to show some friends the new SFX I added.