Hello everyone! ?

This will be the first blog entry here. Furthermore, this is also the first time I am participating in a Game Jam! ?
I am not very good at writing and English is not my native language, so I will try to keep these posts short.

Goals for this challenge

Since this is the first time I am participating in these kinds of challenges I will mainly put my focus on three important points:

1) Finish this project!

For me the biggest challenge in GameDev is finishing a project. Even though I am already doing GameDev for like two years now I have only done prototyping. Sadly, I must admit that I never really finished a project.
So my main goal for this challenge is to have a complete game at the end! ☺️

2) Do everything myself!

Even though I am using Unity I do not want to use any already made assets. For this project I want to create everything myself! This includes making sprites, sound effects, music and writing all the code on my own.
Sadly I am very, very and I really mean very bad at creating creative stuff like sprites and music. I am more of the technical guy and good at writing code. Because of this I want to try a very simple 2D style and ignore the fact that it will look bad. ?

3) Having fun!

As always this should be the most import point. ?

Tools and Frameworks

I decided to stick to the tools and frameworks I have used the last years. I am currently using:

1. Unity3D with C# as the main framework
2. PiskelApp for 2D sprites
3. Bfxr for simple sound effects
4. Bosca Ceoil for the main soundtrack (I don't think I will manage to create more than one...)

Unity3D is the only game engine I have worked with so far. In the future I might try the Unreal engine but for now I will stick to Unity.
PiskelApp is a very basic online tool that allows to create simple pixel art sprites and animations. Since I have basically no skills at creating art assets this is the only tool I use.
Bfxr is a great and simple to use tool to create awesome "retro-ish" sound effects. 
As with creating graphics I also have no experience at making music. Bosca Ceoil is a cool tool to create some basic music and is the only tool I have ever used. ?

Current Progress

Since the first half of the challenge already passed I have already made some decent progress. I decided to stick to the simple gameplay and not to do any fancy stuff.
The player moves the little frog  with the arrow keys to do little jumps. As in the original game the goal is to cross some roads and rivers to reach a goal. The player must avoid enemies and jump on floating wood to cross the river.
Upon reaching the goal line the player gets a certain amount of points and respawns at the beginning. The player starts with three lives. Every enemy kills the frog with one hit . After reaching zero lives the game ends and the player can see his final score and high score.

Fig 1: Current in game scene

Enemies

Currently I have implemented 4 different enemies:

 Car

Cars are spawning on the two main roads and are the main obstacle for the player. Since the large number of cars, it is not easy for the player to cross the roads

 Biker

The biker is randomly appearing on the middle of the two roads and has a very high movement speed. 

 Peasant

Currently three peasants are patrolling the grassy parts between the roads and the river. These guys are walking back and forth. Once the player gets on the same height as the peasant, the peasant charges for the player to kill him.

 Water Peasant (brilliant name I know...)

The water peasants can randomly spawn with a floating wood. If the player is in a certain distance these peasants will start throwing spears at the player.

Every enemy kills the player in one hit which really makes the game a challenge (according to my alpha tester ?)

Items

Yesterday I have implemented two items that can randomly spawn to make the game a little bit more interesting:

 1-Up

A simple extra life that increases the life counter by one. The player starts the game with three life’s and the game ends upon reaching zero lives.

 Shield

This item gives the player a blue shield. When the player collides with enemies while the shield is active the enemy gets destroyed and the player gains points depending on the enemy type.

Sound Effects

I have already created some very simple sound effects using Bfxr. I think these sound effects fit to the "style" of the graphics. Sadly, I had no time for the music yet.

Main Menu

I have also started to work on some basic menus. With the main menu the player can start a new game, change some basic options and exit the game.

Fig 2: Main Menu

The option menu was a lot easier to setup than I thought in the beginning. Unity really offers a lot to implement these basic settings fast.

Fig 3: Options Menu

Other Stuff

I have also started to work on some particle effects to make the game look more interesting. If I have enough time I will try to add some more decoration to make the game look a little bit better.

There are some more things that I have not shown in this post because they are either not that interesting, too hard to show or I have simply forgotten about them. Since I currently have a lot of work during the week I can mainly work on this project in the evening or on the weekends.

Next Goals

For the next week I will focus on these goals:

• Working on menus and menu navigation. In the end I want to be able to control the whole game without a mouse
• Create some more car sprites
• Balance gameplay

There is still a lot to do but I think I have enough time to implement everything I want. ☺️

Okay this entry got waaaay longer than I expected... ?

Sorry for the long post!

I will try to write down my progress weekly from now on. I am pretty sure these will be a lot shorter in the future!

I would love to hear some feedback from you guys! ?

Thanks for reading and happy coding!

- Znippy