Week 1 - Beginning to Build

With a broad outline of a game concept, and an eight week deadline, it's time to start making things a bit more tangible! 

If there's one thing I've learnt from a few successful games jams, scope is everything. I need to be crystal clear about everything I need to do to make this game happen, and have space for things that can be trimmed or added depending on how the time passes in the next two months.

Planning

The first step was to formulate a much clearer written plot - decide the specific characters, what their 'quests' would be, and how the game would begin and end. The gameplay is going to be primarily 'interactive storytelling', and any mechanics are very simple activities - the kind of 'put flowers on my father's grave' level of sidequest. But I need to know what they'll be in order to make them happen!

I wrote these out, and then spent a few hours getting set up on Trello with a list of everything that I'd need to write, draw, model, code, and generally finagle to make toGather a reality. Then I put together a weekly action plan, including every element and giving myself plenty of time at the end for playtesting, polish and bug-fixing. I'd much rather front-load my workload and have a playable game as soon as possible, than end up crunching at the end of the project - especially as I know there are always ways to add to a game. I don't think I'll find myself twiddling my thumbs!

Setting up in Unity - terrain, sound and lighting

Finally, I could start setting things up in Unity.

While whiteboxing is a great idea for mechanically-heavy games, I felt like I wanted to get some visuals into this game as soon as possible. It's so atmosphere-reliant, especially regarding the lighting, I felt that I couldn't envisage the world and the level design without proper terrain surfaces, a skybox, audio, and some simple models. Also, I'm an artist! I can't help wanting to make it look pretty!

So this week has been a lot of work putting everything together - creating 2D textures, character models, painting the terrain, adding ambient noise, making a flowing water shader graph, setting up the character controller, adding footsteps, making a minimap system. I have been incredibly fortunate that the fantastic composer Karlo Sarabia (@kamblammo) had written some music for our original 'forest game' idea that he was happy for me to use in toGather.

For the trees, I've saved myself some workload by using an asset from the Unity store - although using Unity's tree-painter with URP caused a bunch of bugs with the lighting/billboarding that took me far too long to sort out!

The darkness

One element that I really wanted was for 'the darkness' to be threatening to the player - it would never actually harm them, but it was psychologically unnerving and easy to get lost in. It would also serve as a game boundary, hiding the invisible perimeter wall in a thick forest. My jam friend Troels Windekilde (guanomancer.com) was incredibly kind in writing some code for me that would analyse the terrain layer and enact an effect depending on whether the player was walking on the 'darkness' terrain or not. I used this code to dim the player's lantern, quieten the soundtrack, and bring in a sinister sound of a wolf panting and snarling. As you might have guessed, the darkness is a not-so-subtle metaphor for the black dog!