Making Building Bodies

Hi,

This is a quick devlog that I am writing after submitting my game ("Building Bodies") to The GameDev.tv Game Jam 2022. I am going to briefly describe what I did everyday and then what went well (and what didn't). A list of tools I used will be at the end of the post.

I started the jam a couple of days late. Over those couple of day I considered the theme, however, I couldn't come up with any ideas I liked.

Day 1 (23/05/2022):

On the first day, I came up with my initial idea of having to match and created bodies using dead body part. I then created the two sets of body parts that are in the game as well as other assets like the table and body outline in the background. I laid out the table on the body as well as on the order panel. I also programmed the order to randomly generate the parts the player will need to match. I created the basic menu layout, however, I got this working and ended up changing the layout on day 7.

Day 2 (24/05/2022):

On the second day, I made the body on the table match the body in the order panel and made it slightly transparent and dulled down to let the player know that it needs to be filled in. I also got the basic drag and drop mechanic working but at the end of this day it didn't fill in any of the  body parts on the table or snap the draggable parts back to their original position when dropped. Also, drag and drop picked up any draggable part the mouse went over and not just the one that the player wanted to pick up.

Day 3 (25/05/2022):

On day 3, I fixed the issue I was having with the drag and drop picking up more than one draggable part at once. I then created a resized version of the green head for the draggable parts as the original one was too big for the collider. I also got the draggable parts to return to their original position when their are dropped.

Day 4 (26/05/2022):

I didn't manage to make a lot of progress on day 4, but I managed to get the draggable parts to be randomly generated. However, the draggable parts didn't collide with the parts on the table.

Day 5 (28/05/2022):

On day 5, I got the draggable parts to collide with the table and fill in the table parts when they match. The draggable parts also no longer collide with each other and only collide with the parts on the table. The draggable parts also now snap back to their original positions when dropped or placed on an incorrect part. However, I had some issues with the draggable parts not snapping back to their original position every time when they were dropped over the body. My original plan was to drop the draggable parts over the table parts to fill them in, however, sometimes the part would snap back to their original position even if it was over a matching part.

Day 6 (29/05/2022):

On this day, I set up the score system and linked the score UI to so that it updates the score on the screen.

Day 7 (30/05/2022):

On the final day, I set up the timer system so that time will decrease and time will be added for every completed body. I added the game over screen and finished the menu. I then created the music. After this I built the game and submitted it to the jam; originally I was going to create a WebGL build, but when I uploaded it,  I realised I had not got the sizes correct and I looked too big on the page.

What I learned:

Before I started this jam, I had not tried a drag and drop system or tried to create music for a game. I can't wait to try and improve on these aspects of game development in the future.

Conclusion:

I really enjoyed making this game and participating in the jam. Once I had built the game and created the application, I realised that the score on the game over screen doesn't update (even though it did in the unity editor) so I will try to fix this once the jam has completely finished.

Tools used :

• Unity
• Visual Studio
• GIMP
• Glyphr Studio
• Bosca Ceoil