Day 3

Day 3, the crunch time is real. So I sort of panic, I don't have a level, player health, a win state, a lose state, music, SFX, or a menu. 

To start with I made the level, I started  by blocking out a level using the unity terrain editor. It took a bit of playing about, but I think I got a good area to work with. One of the main things I wanted, was a sort of cracked earth effect, with a crevice, the plan was to have either a river of fire, or just a pit to make it a bit more hellish. I didn't manage to get this done. 

This done, I started creating some assets to populate it with, as well as a few materials for the rocks. I made a few, rocks and trees to begin with. The rocks were made using a displacement texture, and a decimate modifier on block outs of the rock shapes I wanted:

The trees were modelled traditionally, I found some reference of dead trees and wastelands and used those to make these:

I finally decided to do a few tufts of grass, I used the particle settings set to hair and rendered an image of this to get grass for the unity terrain editor:

I made sure to render them in black and white so that I would control the colour from Unity.

Finally I made the materials for the rocks and trees. For the rock I made two procedural materials then UV unwrapped the rocks to share a map, and baked them on. I then used a method for baking tile-able textures in blender, to bake these textures to use in the game for the terrain, one of them slightly stretched for the mountain areas.

For the trees I did much the same, baked them into one UV map and made the texture procedural.

One little thing you probably won't see in game is that I actually masked off the tree stump and gave it the rings you see in trees.

Now one thing that is pretty apparent is that all of these are in black and white, this is for two reasons, to give me full control of them in unity, and because I wasn't entirely sure what I was gonna do colour wise for the trees. I was tempted to give them a sort of blood red aesthetic or just really dark so that they are basically silhouettes at all times, and of course I was tempted to just make them brown like regular trees... but dead. 

As for the rocks, well, again it just gives more control in unity, and I used this to give some of the rocks the blood red aesthetic to add to the hellish atmosphere.

I then added fog to add to the atmosphere and put in the grass and trees. One thing of note, for some reason, I wasn't able to put my trees in through the terrain system, I looked it up and the only thing I could find about it was that it may have something to do with the material, that you need a certain type of material to use it. Whatever it is, I couldn't use my custom trees without weird effects happening, so I just put them in manually and limited the number, which I think is for the best, as I may have gone overboard on the trees.

For the grass I put the tufts in as a base layer to make that dead grass, and made some bigger tufts to act as dead bushes.

Level done.

Next I made a quick menu:

A very quick menu.

The win and lose states were pretty much just taken from the main menu for time reasons, I was getting a bit wary of the timer at this point. At this point I made a quick piece of music in Bosca Ceoil. Music done.

For the collectables, I just made a copy of the back of the enemies and separated it to make a back of the card, I then just used the enemy material for this.

I added a small particle effect on this card prefab, which would explode out when they spawn, and set it so that they would spawn when the enemy dies, to give a bit of a better effect to them.

I quickly populated the world with the enemies, separating it into the four suits, sadly not having them as unique as I wanted, and the game was done. 48 cards from 2 to king in the game with 3 reapers who represent the aces, but don't drop cards. Just needing the player health.

Player health was a simple matter, I just made it that the projectiles damage you on hit, and made a damage amount in the players script that deals with the damage universally, not great for variety, but I was running out of time. I did a quick UI in the last minutes, I think I started it about 2 hours before the deadline, and managed to just get it finished. With time to spare.

I rendered a picture of the scythe and then messed with it to give what I hoped would be a good GUI effect...

It... it turned out okay.

The collectable area was a bit easier:

I rendered a picture of these cards to make them look like they were falling down.

I then played about with the colours and came out with this:

Which is... okay.

So now I built the game, all done, ready to go, with a fair bit of time to spare, because of this I started playing to test it out a bit, all seemed to be working out okay, it's a bit boring after a while but you know what, I'm just happy it's done at this point, and then I come to a realisation... you can't beat the game. Any eagle eyed of you would have noticed I left out the aces, because that's who the player character represents (fun fact apparently the ace of spades represents death... I'll be honest I didn't know that before the jam, I only found this out after making the reaper character, and someone asked if that's why I was going with it... it is now) So 48 cards (49 there's a 'tutorial' card beside spawn) and 52 on the counter, and I've built the game.

Panic mode. I go back and create at least a dozen spare cards just floating around the place (beside the reapers and in places that are hard to reach) which I decided to call secret cards, and went a bit overboard on them. Still problem solved, now I just need to build the game in an hour, and I'm a bit wary of time at this point. It mightn't bake in time, so I start it and start making the project in itch.io, just sorting it out so that it is ready, and I can publish the slightly broken game in case it doesn't work.

It took like five minutes. I didn't actually know this, but... yeah, apparently that's a thing, so if you have a minor change like adding more collectables after build, it apparently builds faster (I wouldn't want to test it in another high stress situation, but it's quite cool).

So game is built, I have a half hour or so left, I do some quick screenshots for the cover and stuff then submit it. Day 3 over.