Great Spring Game Jam

I liked the theme of this jam but I am also a bit worn out from the last two recent jams (Brackeys and Wowie Jam) one of which was particularly intense as I was creating all of the 2D Art in 72hrs which I have never done.  So for this Jam I want to focus a bit more on coding and improving my problem solving coding skills. I don't want to spend more than a few hours on art.

I have two initial ideas:

1) You are planting different flowers to produce honey but the more you plant the more bees are stinging poor Billy.  It is a fun Game balancing production and poor Billy's pain level.

2) An idle game where you plant flowers to produce different types of honey which you can sell and unlock. 

I am leaning towards idea two as it is a bit more challenging. I liked the last two jams because they made me work on something completely different; so I think going for option 2 allows me to try a new Genre (clicker game? Idle Game?). Something I never understood the fuzz about. Why would someone spend hours clicking buttons to unlock things that make you click the button faster? The whole concept of clicker games is odd to me. So what better time to experiment and learn than a JAM?! 

Just as I did for the Brackey's Jam, I want to review at least a few popular clicker games to see where I could provide something new and unique.

04-Mar: 

• Bottom line: I am surpised that some clicker games are so hyped that people actually do SPEED RUNS and hour long youtube videos on how they beat the game. I can see skill based games and classic games such as DOOM II in speedruns, but clicker games?! That is odd, but also insightful: If you get players interested and give enough incentives...
• Apart from doing research on "famous" clicker games, I followed along a few tutorials on using XML data for loading data; I figured I will be having a few stores in the game with different attributes and rather than using ScriptableObjects, I opted for XML; took a few hours and it was painful but I got a not-so-pretty protoype working; you can click and earn money after the timer is done, buy more stores and unlock a second store if you have the money:

• Oh, thanks to the last Game Jam, I decided to give the Unity Collab tool another chance. I  stopped using it because I ran out of  cloud space and didn't want to invest into more storage; it turned out, that you can just archive your previous collab projects and your cloud space is back at 100% So now I can work on my PC and laptop without using ancient technology such as USB sticks - wow

06-Mar:

• After two days (!) of frustrating work on getting the UI scaling to work, I QUIT. I tried everything, but for some reason the prefab panels scale to 2.41x the size and it messes up everything. I created new prefabs, experimented with canvas group, layout groups, even made a script to reset the scale back to 1x. I made such amazing progress on getting the backend to work with the XML integration and making it scalable but I fail at the simple UI itself - nice :) Oh well. That kill motivation - 10hrs or coding and 10hrs of troubleshooting on something annoying as the UI Canvas and not resolving it is really sad; right now I am thinking about not pursing the idle tycoon idea any more

08-Mar:

• I cannot resist jams; I made a matching cards protoype (the old kids games where you have a set of cards with two matching images that you need to find)
• After a bit of thinking (2hrs) I got an idea on how I could implement the idea

10-Mar:

• I made some flower "art" and background art and I think I am almost done
• Quick sound track using google music study and tadaaa done
• A bit of particles to make it a little bit more lively

There is no second level, no progression, no novelty to it; but hey - I practiced pixel art (I hate flowers and SLOPES) but happy with the coding :)

Another jam done (well, if that bloody webGL works ONCE IN A LIFE); For the next one, I really want to try and build a UNIQUE mechanic, even if that means I have to read 100 pages of unity documentation, I really want to solve a problem and not follow tutorials for my problems. That would be a big step up :)

Oookay, as always: It took literally 3hrs to try and work out a WebGL build. I had the exact same settings as for the Brackeys Jam, yet the game just never loaded. So I randomly guessed and tried different settings and these settings seem to work:

I changed the auto graphics API to manual and deleted WebGL 1.0 (might be too old and some browers don't support WebGL1?)  and also changed the color space to linear.

I ticked "allow unsafe code" because my code is spaghetti code and deadly - so letting that mess run seems logical.

Disabled data caching and disabled the compression format (which was a common forum suggestion - but that trick by itself does nothing).

So, no idea why THAT specific combination of settings works, but let's hope it is the magic formula for all future game jams :D