Jam devlog

       The woman opened the old diary with care.
        "Crónicas de Castilla. Septiembre de 1528."
        That was it. The month that changed history. That's when they arrived.

Note: this devlog post was originally located in this forum thread.

This week, as my entry in the Week of Awesome V jam, I'm developing Castilla 1528, a castle defense game in which the player helps the medieval Kingdom of Castilla to defend against an alien invasion.

As an added bonus, I'll try to present the game in the NES jam, too, which requires me to only use the NES palette and keep the game under a fixed resolution.

From Late Sunday to Tuesday

I had a rough start, as I somehow managed to get busy during Monday and half Tuesday. Given that the jams last a week only, this is a fatal blow to my game, which I hope to manage to finish anyway.

The first thing I did was to think what to do. I considered several options for fulfilling the jam theme, from an adventure game to some kind of interactive novel. In the end, I decided to go for the castle defense, as I wanted to make something dynamic.

I started by picking an art style. I'm not an artist, so I usually suffer creating my game assets. This time, I decided to try some ultra-minimalist (8x8) pixel art, with the hopes that the simple graphics would allow me to go faster with them. It wasn't that easy, though, and I still needed some time for creating some decent stuff.

It's not Skyrim, but I think it's fun enough.

Afterwards, I had to fight with Unity's 2D camera in order to TRY to make the pixels look perfect. I know the theory behind the ortographic camera size, the screen size, the pixels per unit, etc. that is needed to make pixel-perfect cameras, but, sadly, Unity isn't the best engine for making pixel-perfect games. Even if you manage to make the pixel-perfect camera, small float imprecisions can still make some pixels look off, as sometimes the characters aren't exactly positioned where you need them. For example, I'm not even sure why the feet of the characters look wrong in the animation above.

Anyway, I was wasting too much time on the camera, so I left it in a "close enough" state and will update it if I have enough time in some days.

Wednesday

I've finished all the available characters by adding the Wizard (whose design was ready since yesterday), the Cleric and the Assassin.

I'm not convinced about the Assassin design, but that will do for now.

I also designed a castle, which will be the base that the player must protect. This means that I'm ready to finish coding the core battle system for the game.

Thursday and Friday

I couldn't work a lot in the game on Thursday. However, between both Thursday and Friday I managed to finish the core battle system of the game, including aggro, healthbars and character controllers.

My next steps will [probably] be 1) creating the "invasion" system, which will handle the appearance of enemies (timing and locations), 2) creating the rest of the game art, 3) adding effects (when something hits, explodes or dies) and adding some  sfx and music.