Hi! I'm Ghost! I'm also very anxious! I haven't done much game-making before, I want to do it for a living at some point and I've played around in Unity a bit, but I've never made a project I'd call finished. I'm hoping a time limit and guiding theme like Ludum Dare provides will help give me motivation! I know whatever I make might not be very good, but it'll at least be finished. Let's just hope I can squeeze in this week's homework along with all the jamming :stuckouttonguewinkingeye:. Good luck all!

"Start from nothing." Hmm. Not my first choice for theme, but could be an interesting one. I don't currently have any ideas, I'll see where I'm after I have dinner. I'll chronicle my ideas here. Today will mostly be whiteboard and notebook idea-crafting for me, if I make any interesting progress there I'll post it. Have fun jamming, everyone!

(9:30 PM) It's early, but I've had a long day in a long week and I'm resisting the urge to wrap up for the night.

I put together two ideas today, one that is more complicated to execute on but would be more interesting, and one that's simpler but less interesting to me. I will reveal neither idea in full for now, but let's call them "Shooter" and "Platformer" respectively.

So far I've been poking at Shooter, but I'm not sure on it. I've tried making twin-stick shooters before, and ran into the problem of "how do you make the enemies shoot back." I'll poke at it a bit more tomorrow, but I'm wondering if it'd be safer to switch to Platformer, as, well, I think I'd have a bit of an easier time making it. I'll sleep on it.

Also: physics is hard, and particle systems are weird, and also probably not what I should be focusing on when I have things like enemies and projectiles and things like that to make.

Y'know what, I'll poke at Shooter a bit one. Hold on.

(10:00 PM) Told myself I would stop at 10. I refuse. 10:30 or bust.

(10:25 PM) Close enough. I have the base code for an enemy put in. Enemies now move towards the player and look at them. How they're able to look at them I'm not sure, because rotation and quaternions are weird and I don't quite understand them, but it's something.

Anyway! G'night all, good luck, and don't stay up too late. Be good to yourselves.

Things are going well! I have... almost a full game! It's a top-down shooter kinda thing where you start with no ammo. Everyone, player and enemies, have crossbows. The player has to pick up the enemies' arrows and fire them back. You can only have one arrow loaded at a time, 'cause crossbow.

I still need a death screen, and also there's the whole crashing thing that happens when there's too many enemies and arrows on screen at once (I have a crashed Unity window open as we speak), but otherwise it's there. Once I sort those things out tomorrow, I'll get started on adding more enemy types, sound, etc. Not sure if I'll get around to fancier art, I just have default shapes for now, but we'll see what happens tomorrow. I'll try and make a gif or something for tomorrow.

It's pretty much done! I'll be posting my game, Boltless, tomorrow afternoon. No gifs, unfortunately, but here's some pictures:

It's a top-down shooter where you start with no ammo! You have to pick up enemy arrows one at a time, firing them back one at a time!

Okay! It's over. Stressful last few minutes, mostly 'cause I built and loaded my game for the first time only to discover that the resolution settings on the UI were all funky, but it should be... playable now. I hope. So here's Boltless, my first game jam game!

Here's to a semi-successful jam and a hopefully-better next one!