What is currently in place:

Day one has proven to be rather productive. We have added all the relevant tasking to the tasking website we use to manage our project. If you guys have not heard of activeCollab it is a task management system that allows you to track milestones and everything for a given project. I have created the required milestones and started to task out the events for this week. This will help the two coders work on what needs to be done while allowing me to focus on the art and the design.

What is your theme:

We chose to go with a farmer and a "Harvest Moon" type of game. In part this was due to readily available art assets that we had pre-purchased. I had originally suggested everybody use them when they were free, but that was negated by the concept of a project theme. It is now my job to come up with a way to tie the current theme into the project we had planned. My biggest fear is that we lose the 20pts associated with the theme, but I do not want to sacrafice the concept of our game to gain those 20pts.

As it stands right now I am working on a way to tie the "toys are alive" concept to the current game concept. It shouldnt be too hard but I dont want to do something cliche or overplayed so that is where I am holding off on the final tie in with the project. I will update you guys as soon as I figure out a more solid theme tie in.

Game Design Document:

We have completed the game design document and I will be providing a link to that shortly. The goal is to get as much as possible of the game concept in place before the time is up. This requires a few things:

• UI System
  
• State Machine
  
• Behavior System
  
• 28 Art Assets (custom not purchased)
  
• 10 Custom animations
  
• 42 Custom art assets
  
• 4 Custom Songs
  
• AI System (Tomagachi type behavior)
  
  ByteTroll has expressed concerns with the overal scope. His concerns are felt by us all so we figure that we will have to trim a bit to ensure we have enough time to complete everything. This gameJam has certainly given us a great idea for a future game so if everything goes well we will be moving the unfinished parts into a real project after the fact.
  
  

  Current Scope:

  
  
  
  The current scope is to create the following locations:
  
  
  • Farmhouse (where you can store your items and save the game)
    
  • Barn (where you can put your animals which increase your farm score)
    
  • Farm (where you will conduct the actual farming)
    
  • Merchant Village (this is where you can sell your goods and buy tools)
    
  • Road to Village (this is the difficult part where you will have to avoid some hostile toons to get to the village or to your farm)
    
    The farmer has come of age and told to watch the farm while his Grandfather goes away for a family matter in the mountains to the north. The boy farmer has been part of the farm all of his life so he knows the general concept to how things work but he has never had the full responsability of the farm. His grandfather told him he was unsure of how long the trip would take so it is very possible that this seasons harvest will fall souly on the boy.
    
    

    DAY ONE ISSUES: Knowlege is power, and saves you time:

    
    Day one is almost complete and we have ran into our first snag. Due to my lack of knowledge on unity we have found that our primary model has an issue with its rotation transform. This problem can be avoided by doing some hacky work arounds, but as with anything it would be ideal if we can fix the issue rather than hack around fixing it. To sum up what the issue is:
    
    
    
    1. Unity requires that all objects face the Z+ direction for forward.
       
    2. Having already put 5 hours of work into the control rig and default animations fixing the issue (how I know to fix it) would cause 5 hours of rework
       
    3. Our only option at this point is to create a -90 degree transform on all the animations. This is a simple fix but again hacky at best.