Day 1 - The Brain Storm

So Day 1 of the Brackeys Game jam 2021.1 Whooooo done.

The theme was announced 11am my time so I had already had breakfast and counted down the seconds for the big reveal. 

"Stronger Together" - Theme has been revealed

OK. I started by checking some discord servers for ideas.  Most people had started to get some ideas in place, people were thinking forces, planets, teams, sticking blobs, etc. I just sat down and started brainstorming. I just wrote down anything that came to mind, here is the brainstorm:

Finishing off I highlighted the 2 I was most interested in. Ants and molecules, both small things that came together to form complex structures. I decided I would go with ants as my main idea. The idea I had was a puzzle game where it mimicked what fire ants do when it floods. Fire ants create living rafts to help keep afloat. I started to flesh the idea out more.

My idea is now set! I will make a grid puzzle game where you control a queen ant whose colony is flooding. To escape you have to work together with the worker ants to be escorted out and find safe land to settle down on. 

With my idea firm in my head I started to mess around, doing whatever tasks I felt like. I started by making some rough art to use as place holders.

Having never worked with Unity in 2d I began searching basic of working with it.  I have decided to use a tilemap system to the levels quickly and easily + it was going to be grid based anyway.  I followed these 2 really useful tutorials :

• https://www.raywenderlich.com/23-introduction-to-the-new-unity-2d-tilemap-system
• Brackeys Video

I haven't started coding the basic mechanic  but that's future me's problem. I did start working out how the core mechanic will function, creating some basic rules that it will follow and also created a space to put some level designs in.  I plan to do most of the level design in here and probably some of the art and story as well.

And so that leaves what I have in the unity project atm. It isn't much but hopefully it will be much more by the end of the week

So there it is. All the work that I did on Day 1.

Goals for tomorrow :

• Get top down movement implemented
• Create more ground tile variations
• Create some decorative stuff (mushrooms, plants, etc)
• Animate the water
• Re upload sprites in correct colorspace 
• Make core mechanic