Hello!

This is the first devlog on this site and I would like to explain our situation related to Dallas Dreamhack Game Jam and also discuss gaming stuff.

I will also describe what has happened to us during this game jam (29 March - 7 April).

First day (29 marca):

I remember that we had to wait a lot longer than it should have been (so the time was finally extended by the organizers) and the first thing we thought after the topic was announced was a kind of Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture (5 Minutes To Die) game mechanics,
where you explore the world for five minutes and then die.

Bruno T. (w4ty), our main designer assumed, that we should make another part of Survive The Zombies series in the form of game jam topic and we thought that this would be the direction we would like to go further.
So we quickly created the project on the relevant pages (Trello, Github, Game Jolt) and named it: “5 Minutes to Survive The Zombies”. w4ty immediately made the promotional graphics.

Michał‚ B. (Biegus), our programmer, also managed to create a basic, prototype AI for zombies.

This day was more focused on ideas than on actual development.

Second day (30 March):

Here the light at the end of the tunnel started to appear (literally!) and we created the lighting system and the core of the equipment system.

Third day (31 March):

I started to create graphics and focus more on them than on scripts (I preferred to leave it to Biegus, who knows it inside out).

In this day first version of our Level Editor has been created. Of course it was still unstable and didn’t have most of the features that have at this moment, but… “it’s a one small step for a man”.

Inventory and equipment system with items began to function slowly. Firearms functioned not in a graphic form, but in the form of empty space (you shoot from your hands! Of course! :D).

Fun Fact: One of our items is classified as Consumable, although it is a note.

Fourth day (1 April):

In this day we created a time calculation script (1 real second is 1 minute in the game) and frankly this day was not very productive.

Fifth day (2 April):

I started to work on gamepad support (which was the main rule of game jam), but I came across one mistake related to the rotation of the character with the right stick (additionally Unity engine was strangely detecting triggers and various buttons).
Also, Main Menu was ready (not fully, but it was close).

Sixth day (3 April):

Since we needed a character model and I’m not a professional graphic designer nor w4ty, Biegus contacted his friend Jakub (Alias), who helped us with all kinds of graphics (mostly player’s character, some items and zombie models).
We also added a consumable item system to the inventory.

Seventh day (4 April):

Graphic designer has enough of top-down graphics, which slowly drives him crazy. Main Menu is working fully.

Eighth day (5 April):

Pausing the game is already possible, we also add as many icons as we can. Also, the whole HP system is working properly. Level Editor was slowly growing into new features, so we preferred not to share it with level designers until there were enough features (which later resulted a time delay).

Ninth day (6 April):

The biggest changes. Changes both in the Gameplay Scene and the whole design, we added layers and loot to our Level Editor (this was our main priority, because we wanted to send it to the Level Designer). That’s when we started to add items and descriptions connected to them. We also added a volume system (when you sneak, you make less noise).
I was also working on a way to fix an earlier bug with Gamepad Support and together with Biegus I somehow managed to put it all together.

Tenth day (7 April - last day of the game jam):

The ability to load levels, previously created in the editor - it was something that was the most prioritized, but we managed to do it surprisingly. Zombies got an upgraded artificial intelligence and could already take over the world follow and forget the player.
It was at this point that we started to feel a little overwhelmed by the amount of unfinished stuff, but we didn’t have much time.
From that day on, w4ty took care of his earlier things and could help us with the game more, which still wasn’t enough to finish the game on time (the amount of unfinished things overwhelmed everyone).

We were introducing something related to the end of the game, which should have been finished long ago.

We finished working and went to sleep at about 1:00 AM to wake up again at 6:00 AM and get back to work. We were very happy to hear that the jam game will be extended by 2 extra hours. Unfortunately, that was not enough.

The last moments of working on the game were full of chaos. We were typing lines of code without really thinking about what’s going on. It looked almost like those funny GIFs with cats, but instead of cats there are people, but returning to the topic - we couldn’t work out the last thing - random selection of levels and copying them to the player’s files (so that he doesn’t have to copy maps to Documents by himself).

So that’s how our story about Dallas Dreamhack Game Jam ended. We had ups and downs, but in the end we had a huge down and deadline.

What about 5 Minutes to Survive The Zombies?

Game will be released as Early Access game probably this or another week. We still need to fix bugs (splash them all!).

Thanks for reading!
~TheMatiaz0