So, this game is finished...it is some product...but did it meet my expectations? No. I can blame it on my health at the moment, bad sleep...wrong preparation, but I am simply not impressed with the result and here is how that came to be.

Six rumbling pilars

1. The initial idea was to have a shader dependent surrounding. Where the angle of the player would cause a doorway to be visible.

2. That idea was replaced when I was building the initial mechanics for simple rotation of blocks....using the required assets. The result from that looked kind of cool and promising.

3. Looking at the different assets, I got the idea that it would be fun to imagine a very large city where streets could change (like in Hogwarts) to let the player move through. 

4. The idea was build and quickly finish it, but some technical issues arose. Nav Meshes don't play nice with moving objects...unless all objects are made obstacles...or something... So I had to rethink the architecture during the building and already a day in.

5. When I finally had the setup with 3D tiles and rotation in several ways drawn out, I started to rebuild 1 level that would be easy and a good base. The IslandWorld. By now, I noticed that I lost precious time that would cause me to cut off most of the items I wanted to have in the game. The mere basics would work, but that would be it.

6. The fact that for some reason my system wasn't nice with Unity, caused me to redo several steps and added to that the new input system caused a remarkable issue I hadn't anticipated:

Going in circles

When you install the new input system, you are asked to reboot and the old system is entirely taken out. However, this also stops one of the easiest to miss and (in my case out of ease to not having to use raycasts) rudimentary messages: onMouseDown. This suddenly meant my game was useless with the new system, unless I was able to circumvent this issue. With only a couple of hours left on Saturday, the fact that I didn't want to risk more delay by changing input to both, I removed the input system, requiring me to redo code from the nice event system to the simplistic 'Input.GetKey' and 'Input.GetAxis'. So, no certainty on gamepads etc. 

Turning the dials

The other thing was that I wasn't sure on the actual goal of the game. Was the player supposed to reach a goal, requiring a charactercontroller of sorts, while requiring mouse input at the same time.....I saw the Tidy Worldy, which was a bit what I had looked for, but the initial setup from point 1 kept gnawing at me. I wanted a city to walk through. As Nav mesh and a AI character weren't implemented within the timeframe, I went for the charactercontroller (yes even used the charactercontroller basics, but that wasn't giving the feel at all) option with mouse down to change the tiles. 

converging revolation

This left me: without the tutorial option, and many of the rotation items I wanted to use in the game.

So, this Jam was something I could learn a lot from, even while not doing it in our normal team.