Brackey's Jam 2020.2 "REWIND"

Oh yes! The game jam I've been looking forward to! Brackey's got me into making my first game CUBETHON! What an amazing tutorial, it changed everything, made me start the GameDev Journey and made me pick up programming, game development, artwork, game design, game music creation, basically EVERYTHING!  Sadly, I won't have the full week (wife's baby coming soon, crazy workload with the new job, moved in to my in-law's house...) but I will try my best to deliver at least SOMETHING for this jam.

Needlesss to say - I am going SOLO on this game jam again :)

Day 1: A classic game jam theme... "REWIND" - I even remember a Brackey's tutorial on that topic a few months ago; or was it slowmotion? Maybe slowmotion...Given the little time I expect to dedicate to the jam, I need to keep it simple, so, off to...

BRAINSTORMING:

• I fell in love with VoxelArt, so it will be some kind of VoxelArt
  • Maybe go for some medieval room, cozy old place, a retreat study room, or hunter's lodge?

• I always wanted to learn how to use Text input from the user and what I can do with it, so I want to look for turorials on TextAdventures
• What about a room, with clues and you try to "remember" (aka. go back to your memories) find the keys -  a classic comedy element ("jeez where did I left the keys? Of course they are in the fridge)
  • That might score me some points on the "Brackey's Fun Scale", wouldn't it?
  • Combining the VoxelArt 3D room with a TextAdventure might be a cute combination of two genres that fit well together
• That sounds like a good enough outline for  a game jam - let's just do the fun stuff and create a nice VoxelArt room

THE ROOM:

THE SCRIPTING:

• I've found an official Unity TextAdventure tutorial that I could digest in a few hours; a lot of new things that I did not fully understand yet; but I feel like I am more comfortable with using simple ScriptableObjects and taking in user input from InputFields
• I finished the entire tutorial and the room, and that is an amazing spot to be in - only 8 hours after the jam, the visuals and the script is mostly done (well, the core mechanic, not the story and sound, etc.)

THE STORY LINE:

• You are Asbjörn Theodorius (first name obviously referencing Mr. Brackey's himself), a retired wizard in a lodge far off civilization
• Being tired of human interactions, he locked himself into a room and made the door disappear 
• Anticipating, that he would have to leave home at some point, and knowing that he tends to forget things recently, he left clues to himself to retrace the spell to create the door and get out
• You explore the house, inspect objects, get clues, but damn is it hard to remember sometimes...
• Are you up for this hard challenge? 

Day 2: Spent most of the day pimping the UI and making the VoxelArt Room fit in with the TextAdventure - 3hrs well spend?!

• I always feel my UI looks really poor and cheap in all my games, it is definitely something that I need to work on - but I struggle to find a "method" to it; it is not composition that I struggle with, or the colors I chose; It is more of the overall pixelart-style that I struggle with; I always envision a nice, detailed UI but in reallity I lose patience whenever I need to spend more than 5 min in GIMP to click pixels around - any tipps anyone?
• Nontheless, I think the boxes are DECENT, the colors are OKAY, the overall look and feel is OK
• I finally connected the actions with the scriptable objects, so I am making progress
• Now I think I use this calm summer evening to work on some retro-80s music for the game :) A resemlence to the old ZELDA for the original NES would be nice - let's check-in in half an hour (that's usually how much time I spend on music)
• Pretty much exactly 30min later I have a decent music "prototype"; it has a good nice vibe to it, but it is not quite perfect yet - let's improve it over the next days

Day 3: I embedded the commands for the different objects and the clues that the player can find, but didn't do too much. I struggled with the ScrollRect and the sidebar because the text does not scroll automatically, so you need to  manually scroll. Not sure if I want to be lazy and just call it a bad feature of if I should spend time trying to fix it. I also worked on a simple menu - I included AZRAEL, my wizzard that I used for a previous jam as well, because he just fits in :)

Day 4: Okay, the text not scrolling REALLY annoys me. But I spend yesterday evening about 1hr searching on unity forums without success. There are some suggestions, but they require a LOT of code and I don't understand half of it. In my lunch break I decided to search a bit more, still hoping for an easy fix. AND THERE IS ONE! So here is what I did to scroll automatically after each text input: In my GameController script I added:

• public ScrollRect scrollRect;
• In my start method: GameObject.Find("ScrollRect").GetComponent<ScrollRect>().verticalNormalizedPosition = 2f;
• In my DisplayLoggedText method:         scrollRect.velocity = new Vector2(0f, 200f);

It has one drawback: It does not calculate how much it needs to scroll; it just scrolls down 200 (whatever unit that is), regardless of the amount of text input and regardless of how much the text response to the input is. So, it does not entirely solve the issue, as the player still needs to scroll and adjust occasionally, but HEY, better than letting the player do all the work.

Tonight I will fix the music, which I will allocate max. 1hr for it. 

Day 5: I think I am done (maybe?). The game feels a bit "static" and blant. But that might be because of the nature of a Text Adventure. I never really played Text Adventures and never understood the fascination behind them, so I can't really compare if this a decent or terrible Text Adventure. At this stage it would also be too late for user testing, I guess? 

Recap/lessons learned:

• Another game jam done - Woohooo!
• I  made my first Text Adventure - eventhough the tutorial was a bit too advanced for me and I think I only learned a little bit about ScriptableObjects and using Text Input - but baby steps are better than nothing
• Fairly happy with the VoxelArt style - it could really be worse! 
• I finished in time - again. It seems that I can assess quite reasonably how much time I need to finishe a project
• Music: I like the music I created. It is definitely at least AVERAGE
• Fun: The category I struggly with most. I always have these low-pace games, that don't have much speed or interaction. They are usually very story-driven and focus on a simple narrative. I need to re-think my choice of game genres for game jams. But at the same time I want to do many genres to learn more broadly... hmmm.
• Theme relevance: I think all games so far were in line with the Theme - I never missed the theme, but looking at other works in progress for this jam, I am amazed by what people come up with. A really amazing rewind feature, unique game mechanics, etc. There are just so many really good games being submitted. 

Well, that's it. Probably the last game jam for a few months, maybe even for this year, but let's see :) 

Results are in:

There were 1859 submissions and fierce competition :) I'm fine with the result:

I am really suprised by Game Desing being #171 that is crazy - I have no idea what that category REALLY means, but that would put me in the top 9% of all submission. lowest category being theme (but still top 45%).  An overall score of 483 is also damn good! Woop Woop, thats also top 25%! Thanks Brackeys for this jam, thanks for rating everyone and playing the game!