My First Ever Jam! A Process Devlog.

I debated between selecting “Postmortem” and “Game Design” for this devlog post and realized that there’s a good chance I won’t be able to leave Wrong Pool alone in its jam version and will have to finish it at some point! So “Game Design” it is. 

Some Background:

• Game Dev Unlocked: I’ve been in David Wehle’s Game Dev Unlocked course since the height of the pandemic (but only really actively participating recently) and I’ve been learning a ton! If you can afford it, I think it’s a great course with a great community behind it.
• The Jams: This is the 4th game jam put on by GDU, and I haven’t been able to participate in any of the others due to time issues (and confidence issues lol.) Now that I’ve been working on a game for a while and have a lot more knowledge in the ol’ brain cavity, I really wanted to jump into this one!
• Worm Goes to Hell: I’ve been going hard in development for my first game, Worm Goes to Hell - which you can wishlist on Steam now! - and it was tough to take a break, but I think participating in this jam was actually super helpful for my creative brain! I’m reinvigorated and super excited to get back to developing WGTH. 

My Design Process: 

• Gotta start small - asset searching time! I knew with my limited time if I was going to do the jam at all I needed to do something super small. (I should have gone smaller still, but ah well.) I didn’t have time to do something from scratch really, so I browsed the Unity Asset store for something water-related that might inspire me. I really didn’t want to spend any money since my housemate recently moved out, but I found this cool water asset that came with a pool scene called MS UnderWater Effect (underwater) by Marcos Schultz
  . The little pool scene spoke to me, and it was only $10 so I bought it - money spent means I need to actually complete this jam - yikes!
• Steal the Scene: The easiest thing to do was load up their cute little sample scene and start making it mine! I didn’t have time to make one from scratch, and I like the idea of using a premade scene as a constraint to tell a story within. I started adding in other assets and some post-processing to make it feel more “me”.
• Controller Woes: I spent way more time than I would have liked trying to get the water script to work with my preferred first-person controller, with no luck. It broke the camera movement every time! I’m sure there’s something simple I was missing, but I didn’t have time for that rabbit hole so I decided to do my best to make the example controller that came with the scene work. 
• No time - steal some ideas and jam them together: I’m still very new to game development and panicked when it came time to come up with mechanic ideas. So what to do? Well, I decided to take the monster following you mechanic from an early module in the GDU course, jam it together with the gem collecting scripts from Thomas Brush’s free 3D course, and fill in the blanks with my loose story. The pitfall here? I did like, half the game with Playmaker’s visual scripting and half of it with modified C# scripts from Thomas’ course, and did not have the time to make them mesh beautifully behind the scenes. I don’t think this will be super obvious to players though.
• Oh, crap - no menu! So finally, after some painful troubleshooting, I got it set up so that the player can collect the gems, get them to the Mushroom house to win, and you die if the lifeguards get you. But no main menu! I really wanted to figure out some voice lines and other fun stuff to find, but I decided the menu was more important to do as it was getting late and I had to get up at 6am for work, so I threw together a basic little menu with the instructions and background.
• Try the voice lines, fail hard: For some reason, I could not get the reticle to work the way I wanted. I learned in the GDU course how to get it to light up when hovering over an interactable thing, then have you click on the thing and trigger events, etc. using Playmaker, and I got a similar system working in Worm Goes to Hell, but I could NOT get it working here and realized I had to be up for work in 5 hours, so it was time to build and submit. Ah well, it’s a jam - right?

Things I Wish I’d Gotten To:

• Dialogue: There was supposed to be some dialogue to tie things together better. My original plan was to have the player be able to click on the Mushroom house and have the “person” who lives in there do a little, “GO AWAY! I won’t let anyone in without them bringing me the orbs!” and the doll in the one pool was going to talk, and likely some other things. Maybe some thoughts from the player character as well. If I revisit this jam submission, I’m for sure going to do that and implement David’s subtitle/fan translation because I think that’s a neat way to do it.
• The Character Controller: I don’t like the example controller as much (due to my own C# limitations, no shade to the dev who made it!) and if I go back, I really want to figure out a way to get something like the Opsive UFPS controller working with the water script. Plus, that would let me set up Rewired easier to make the game controller friendly! 
• More Things: I wanted to flesh the little world out some more, and give it a bit more environmental storytelling. More stuff in the pools, graffiti on the walls, stuff like that. Make it feel a little more full and alive. 
• Tighten it up: I wanted the buildings to be a little less haphazard, I think I’ll go in and even them up a bit. I want them to be a bit off, you know, since this is a weird little dimension, but it feels a little too chaotic to me right now. Also, I need to put up some invisible barriers because you can definitely just jump through them and break out of the game lol. 
• Credits: I didn’t use any assets/sounds that require attribution, but I want to go back through and make a list for some credits anyway, it seems like the cool and polite thing to do.
• The End Winning Screen: This needs to be better - I was falling asleep in my chair when I made this one. I want to flesh it out, and figure out a way to actually have it end the game - right now it just pops up and you get eaten by a monster in the background and the game restarts. I don’t know the best way to do this yet, since there’s kind of two different systems powering the game (Playmaker actions as well as a bunch of random C# scripts) but I think I can update the script to destroy the lifeguard aliens and then build in a UI button that the user can click to quit? (I just thought of that as I was typing this up!)