I fully intend to submit something to my first LD Jam!
Booked the days off at work, reinstalled Unity 2018.2, downloaded the extensions I feel will be most useful (ProBuilder, ProGrids), bookmarked the Unity documentation, updated and tested my VST plugins, briefly tried and failed to grasp pixel art and Blender modelling...I'm doing great!
Hoo-wee, that's a lot of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy references to sift through that belong in past decades because everyone's already heard them by now. I also noticed that the idea of subverting expectations is not a theme that subverts expectations lmao. That said, there were a lot of themes I really would like to see implemented!
I worked on something, and if I hadn't, I may never have given it a shot again. So that's the silver lining!
The dark cloud, however, is that my game can't build (there are Unity system errors beyond my control that cause the build to fail every time), and several functions I programmed with tutorial scripts from as recent as 3 months ago for reference do not serve their purposes.
The game is about a shadow trying to bring back his friends, in a world that's had all shadows removed due to a curse. The curse also says that nobody will notice that they've lost their shadow, but all shadows will be gone forever (and the sun will burn everything) if someone notices a shadow alone in the open. The main character has to collect shade underneath NPCs and (eventually) props like buildings, revive the shadow that belongs to that NPC (or prop) and move to the next one quickly enough to build up a "shade multiplier" (basically points to buy upgrades and abilities later).
[HOW IT TIED INTO THE THEME, IF I COULD HAVE MADE IT] Essentially during one playthrough you wouldn't have the chance to go back and level select, so you get one chance to get as many points as possible per level (the first being a 4-way stop light intersection, possibly next a city block, even a whole city if I'm ambitious enough) and upgrade your traits, and end the game with both a brag-worthy score and an OP player character. If you didn't play fast enough, or didn't strategize which objects to chase after well enough, then you'd RUN OUT OF SPACE in the level from which to get shade. I know, confusing, but you'll just have to take my word for it.
What I couldn't do was get NPCs to obey the NavMesh; they wanted to walk across the street from their spawn point, when the only way to get to their destinations was to reach the intersection and cross from THERE. Next I couldn't get their animations to work fully (their walk cycle was missing a bunch of frames; it played smoothly, but was posed awkwardly) AND couldn't get the animations to STOP when they met the conditions under which I TOLD them to stop.
Oh well! I'll passively work on it again soon. I've got music deadlines to reach before I can work on game dev again.