Just finished my third game jam: https://itch.io/jam/goedware-game-jam-13 They have an additional goal of making a devlog. Since I made one after every game jam so far anyway, I might as well write another and a more detailed one. See bottom for a video with clips of the various stages.

In this game jam I used more complex terrain stuff for the first time and also for the first time used navigation mesh / NavMeshAgent stuff.

Brainstorming Phase

This game jam had the theme "Breaking the Loop". The first obvious idea to that is of course some kind of "ground hog day" time loop like in The Stanley Parable or The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask or some kind of rogue like game. I don't like going for such a super obvious interpretation because I don't want there to be so many similar games. Also this one sounds potentially story and content heavy and I like to be more gameplay focused and there are only 10 days to make a game. I also thought about some kind of arcade or puzzle game but had no idea with that theme.

Recently I'm starting to use AI tools like DeepSeek and Perplexity, mostly as a better search engine since those have gotten so bad. Sometimes they also have pretty good ideas. Somewhat shortened from my brain storming notes I wrote at the start of the game jam:

Chatted a bit with DeepSeek which had great ideas in the past. After bad or ground hog day ones it came up with a game about generations of people which made me think of Medieval Dynasty where you eventually die and continue as your child. Made me also think about Timberborn which revolves around reoccuring floods. Kinda like tides. I suppose a game revolving around reoccuring and changing things like tides or days or years could be interesting. If there is such a reoccuring threat: How would you exactly break it? Would you just build things to deal with it like in Timberborn? There the player is kinda breaking it by ideally changing the cycle of "too much / bad water" and "too little" water into a steady stream or supply by building big storages and filters.
The tide has to be a threat from the start giving you bad conditions...
Instead of a tide it could also be very hot days or summers and very cold nights or winters. The issues is the same though. It has to be bad at the start but without wiping you out and there has to be a notable progress. Not just some trivial "have buildings on stilts" or "better isolated buildings". Maybe it's more about a difficult food supply limiting how many people can live there. Maybe it's like an Empire Earth situation where you start with hunters and gatherers and develop proper farming and industry adapted to the challenging conditions.
It could also be a tower defense like game with monsters coming every night.
A season system would make it possible to prepare quite a while before the first "disaster" hits. So that one would be about droughts and cold winters.
Seasons and tides could also be combined. So one would just put buildings on stilts or make them float while being attached to columns? One could put soil on those floating platforms for farming. During a tide one would not be able to access the ground unless it's high enough (mountain), is it high enough anywhere? Could one build protected elevators to still go underground? Are there underwater buildings? Is it maybe a game like Planetbase where you build these domes on Mars but here underwater? Just having the whole city float up and down or be static above sea level seems a bit silly. There is probably no time for proper fluid simulation stuff but it seems boring without. So a seasonal city builder where you just store stuff for the hard seasons? Seems so generic.
Tower defense? Something like Stronghold? So the waves of monsters every night get stronger and stronger? Would you break the loop by destroying all enemy bases on the map kinda like in Factorio? One potential issue of those games is waves destroying enough to hamper your ability to prepare and improve for the next wave encouraging save scumming.
Maybe it's like in Empire Total War or Europa Universalis where you have a threat level and being strong makes enemies more aggressive. Them winning against you, makes you weaker and less of a threat.
Another issue is enemies breaking through the defenses and hitting your economy really hard. They could just disable buildings like in Ratopia with your people running away. There enemies in the base just kinda pause the economy but getting rid of them is still pretty hard. They could also steal stuff. Maybe them just attacking defenses that attack them and just plundering would be a good idea. That's actually kinda what is happening in Farthest Frontier.
Strategy games are more about getting a continuous production up and are less about having a lot just sitting in storage. Building materials matter but it usually doesn't matter if you have 10 or 1000 food/clothes/... as long as the production is high enough. Money could play a role and even attract enemies. But again at some point you are often just stockpiling a ton. Which could attract a lot of enemies though. So ideally one keeps the money amount low? The amount of wealth you or your whole city have could double as a highscore.

So with that I had somewhat of an idea. A Ratopia and Farthest Frontier style game with seasons and reoccurring bandit attacks just like there. Also a scaling difficulty based on stockpiled resources as a unique twist and also scaled by the amount of buildings. Pretty much all city building games become boring in mid or end game where your citizen are relatively happy and you are quite safe from attacks. Both of those games are well done but still struggle by bouncing between "that attack was really easy" and "how am I supposed to win against such a strong army??".

I spend like half a day on thinking about that and then like 1.5 days thinking about a name with the help of AI... It had a lot of bad ideas but also some good ones. I wanted a name that contains the idea of it being based on cycles/loops to fit the game jam theme and also a name that hints towards it being a city management game. In the end the result was "Prosperia: Cycles of Cash and Chaos". Sounds like a city/village/kingdom/country name plus is about there being cycles plus mentions wealth and some kind of threat. Also I like alliterations (words starting with the same letter).

I also tried to make a short description with the help of AI. After a long back and forth we ended up with:

Build a thriving city in a world where prosperity has a price. Manage bandit raids and seasonal climate extremes as you strive to break the endless loop of suffering. Can you build a thriving society, or will your city crumble under the weight of its own success?

I also found it funny how the AI hypes you up with things like:

• "This is a fantastic concept! The idea of tying wealth directly to danger (via bandit attacks) adds a unique twist to the traditional city-building formula, creating a constant tension between growth and security."
• "Let me know if you’d like help prototyping or refining any of these mechanics further! Good luck with development—it sounds like a fantastic project! 🚀"

Development

Unity comes with a "FPS Tutorial" which is like a simple shooter with robots and towers attacking you. I knew already that they can be assigned to different teams to attack each other. Sounded like something I could use for my bandits...

I started by removing the first person and direct character control things and making a typical strategy game top down camera instead.

Then I replaced that blocky level with terrain: Most strategy games including Farthest Frontier use a top down view and a generated terrain landscape which is pretty much flat with lakes and mountains. I decided on the same since it's easy and fluid simulation or digging around underground don't really play a role. After trying out various really bad terrain systems I found MapMagic 2 which is kinda usable but tricky to use.

I found decent building models in a "Viking Village" Unity demo and the big chunk of actual game logic programming started. For quite a while with capsules as bandits. Eventually replaced those with animated bandits, added trees/forests, replaced the mill model with a different one, replaced the water with a better third party water shader, ...

Nearly all the stuff from the FPS Tutorial was super fragmented and I couldn't figure out why the AI was sometimes not attacking so I threw all of that out and did it myself. The navigation agent/mesh stuff in Unity is surprisingly easy to use. The only thing I ended up using from the FPS tutorial was the health bar and a particle texture I turned into a particle trail effect for the arrows...

A collection of various clips:

Timestamps (go to Youtube to have them clickable in the description):

• 0:00 The unmodified Unity FPS Tutorial
• 0:21 Changed to a top down view
• 0:32 Added MapMagic 2 terrain and proper camera controls
• 0:57 Buildings from the Viking Village Unity demo. A grid snapping ground marker later to be used to place buildings. Also showing the usually invisible camera center marker sticking to the terrain, the camera moves relative to that.
• 1:17 Towers attacking capsule bandits. At that point the just randomly walked from building to building.
• 1:47 Placeable buildings and bandit capsules that attack towers. Also showing the building range line (LineRenderer) that follows the terrain.
• 2:12 Selectable buildings with an info box.
• 2:21 Proper animated bandit models. Buildings that remove trees in the way when build. Foresters removing trees and planting new ones.

Seasonal Effects

To change how seasons look I change the sun angle, light color temperature, light intensity and I added a white semi transparent angle dependent decal to "cover the world in snow". I wanted to add snow particle effects but again no time...

Post Mortem

So I ended up with some kind of city builder prototype that feels like a tower defense hybrid. I had no time for a lot of things like balancing or audio... Balancing wise I think the start might be ok but I have the feeling that it will become easier and easier.

Somewhat early on I also threw the idea away to implement citizens that have jobs and actually carry items around like in most other city survival games. Instead I just made a global storage system and hoped I might have time for citizens later but I didn't.

Not sure what to do with this project. Just drop it like my previous game jam projects? Before this game jam I never wanted to make strategy games even though I really like city survival games. I wanted to make an action RPG for quite a while but it's quite overwhelming when thinking about the amount of work.