Learn You a Game Jam Day 1 devlog

So Day 1, I completely forgot about the gamejam as I had a lot of other projects lined up but decided I was gonna try and juggle all of it anyway. Only time will tell if this was a good idea or not.

Theme

The theme is "You are the Monster" which would be perfect with a tactics style.

References

Good tactics that come to mind are Fire Emblem, Final Fantasy Tactics, Tactics Ogre, Into the Breach, Advance Wars and I think these are a good variety of references I can use.

Deciding on the look and feel

• Advance Wars and Fire Emblem (GBA version) are top down 2D
• Tactics Ogre and Into the Breach are 2D isometric
• And Final Fantasy Tactics is 3D isometric with 2D sprites

All of these fit great with the pixel part of the game jam but when I think Tactics, I tend to prefer isometric, so I think I've got my work cut out for me.

So what do I already know?

Two things:

• that isometric needs 3 vector points
• and pathing requires A*

So I basically don't know a lot but I'll write down what I thought and we'll see if that changes throughout:

An isometric/3D tile is a Vector with 3 points (x,y,z) with Z being the height of the tiles and the flat side of the tile (where characters step) on the (x, y) axis. This can be used to establish a Tile class (width, length, height) and stepHeight is the Z value characters can jump up to (+- their jump value, but I'm getting ahead of myself)

And A* is a bit of a complicated mess of cost/distance and choosing the path that requires the least amount of cost. I could be extremely inaccurate with this image that I've drawn, but I think it's what it basically boils down to.

Where to start?

Well, like in any project, you have to break it down into parts and see what I don't know and what I already know. Obviously, I don't know anything so this will be an entirely new experience for me but I figured I should put down some basic steps:

1. Create the board in Unity (as that's the game engine I've decided to use)
2. Navigation
3. Battle System
4. Create Characters
5. Create Enemy
6. Enemy AI
7. Control multiple characters
8. UI
9. Overworld
10. Different Tile Types (terrain, defense stat)
11. Extra mechanics (recruitment system, story dialogue, equipment, etc)
12. Polish

A quick google search points to a game programming blog, The Liquid Fire with a really extensive tutorial on how to make a tactics. I figured it would be a great starting point and I can tweak and add from there. However, there are 26 steps and I don't know if I'll be able to finish it on time for everything but I won't know until I try.

So day 1 will just be me going through this tutorial.

*Note to self: If something isn't working, check spelling. I spent hours trying to figure out why my board wasn't loading and it's because I wrote State() instead of Start(). Debug.Log() helps a lot if you just put it everywhere so you know where something is breaking.