Thanks for playing my game, I suppose if you read devlog of it, you've played it aswell!

Idea

I had idea for this game before the jam started, it struck me in the middle of the night to make a spin on Luftrausers, but in space and with level ups, I teamed up with my work colleague and also previous jam team member, where we did make a game with upgradeable weapons and few enemy types. The upgrade system is something I finally think got just right with the tools I had which is Object oriented C# with Unity specific things, so to make weapons I made a bare Weapon abstract class that has some virtual members of what happens when you Press, Hold & Release left mouse button, and also update method to further propagate to projectiles if they had a need for update method. Example, if I wanted to make spinning bullet, I'd use cos & sin functions * Time.deltaTime to accellerate my projectile so it circulates, kind of like Isaac's Ring worm item. So this part was easy for me

First weekend

During day 0, I made a few pixel art graphics for the game, this day was the toughest because as I said I already had idea for this game, I was looking for a gamejam to make it on, ecosystem theme was tough but it ended giving me a very cool story which I had to think through and it was good experience.

Struggle begins

My struggle with this game jam was that I also have "real" work I can't work as much on game jams as I wish I could and as much as I did when I was in school, what makes it tougher is that I work as a Unity dev so Im sometimes fed up with Unity at the end of the day, I'd like to teach everyone who reads this to have fun on jams and don't stress out... but as it often is, do as I say not as I do.

Second weekend

During workweek not much had been done, I ordered two musicians to help me out with music on this jam but I did automate it myself using FMOD:

What you've just looked at is Automation of two songs, controlled by an Intensity paramter, this finally wasn't used but I still want to explain what is happening here so: Drums volume from battle track are directly linked to intensity parameter increasing volume within 0.25 - 0.5 range, above that, volume is constant, loops are made that battle track loops until intensity is not 0, and exploration loops when intensity is 0, exploration can be interrupted by battle music when intensity rises too quickly, sudden jump to value of 1 also causes playhead to move towards battle intense section. I really recommend looking into transitions, regions and automations like this to make music in your games alive!

Except for cool music and upgradeable weapon system base there has been one more complex thing done on the jam which is:

Enemy AI

Leviathan's body is just following the previous piece using normalized delta position multiplied by follow range, pathfinding was acquired using A* package and box grid, to achieve better enemy movement instead of using existing package movement code I did my own where it uses rigidbodies velocity and instead of just rotating, it also rotates velocity to give it that airplane type movement.

I don't have any other advice and noone's gonna read this if it's too long or about things they don't care about, about motivation to keep working, I'd say that I just wanted this game to exist, not exactly in this form, but it's a foundation I can use to make it a thing and hopefully that's gonna work out and people are gonna enjoy it. Just make the things you want to make.