Hello there.

Thanks for checking out The Ancient One's Garden.  I had a lot of fun joining the Holojam 5!  I had some struggles, but it was fun to figure it all out and make something worth sharing with other Hololive fans!  I had planned to write this earlier and start sharing stuff once I was sure I had nothing to fix, but on Friday I was exhausted and then I got sick over the weekend.  So here I am today, a few days later than expected!

This game is based on Hololive, but more specifically it's based on the D&D game I run based off Hololive.  I tried to let the lore tablets clue you into what happened, but it can by no means tell the full story.  And the mystery and lingering questions help set the atmosphere of this place, perhaps you can piece together the heart of the story surrounding this game?

Problems

During this game jam, I had a few plans that fell through.  The biggest was trying to force myself to work with others.  To that end, I limited myself to 3 asset packs out of my literal hundreds from Epic giveaways, and only a couple individual assets.  So if I wanted to get anything more unique, I'd have to ask for help.
I then proceeded to design a game I could make without anyone else.  Honestly, that wasn't my goal, it just worked out that way.
And then I was too shy to ask for help with things I could have actually used help for. Even when someone said they were available if anyone needed music help, I just kinda threw something together myself, regardless of the headache I had at the time...  Yeaaaah...  I did not succeed at learning to work with others better...

Beyond that, there were a few features I didn't make much use of because I ran out of time because I got sick during the jam, and because it took me so long to finally decide on the actual game plan.  For example, I was going to have a bunch of trees that shift and change position as they go on or off screen so the forest never looks consistent even when the paths are the same, and the gates are able to do some much more complicated shenanigans such as multiple sets of portal states.  I was considering a path that required going through multiple gates to properly access.

Luckily, I managed to avoid making the mistake of half-implementing those features in broken and unplayable ways, instead focusing on making sure what I had was fully functional and at acceptable levels of polish.

The last thing I was considering was a more full tutorial, but instead I opted to go for a more organic tutorial pointing you in the right direction with a few signposts to let the player figure it out.  A gamble, hoping the novelty will be fun and interesting.  But looking at the reviews so far I'd say it was a bad gamble.  To be fair, I didn't do much to improve visual clarity of actions.  In retrospect, I needed to add particle effects for type of transition to make it clear who's doing what.

Good Stuff

But that's enough pessimism, I should talk about what I liked about this and my proudest achievements here!  Starting with the AI.

I've made a few simple AI, but the Takodachi in this project were the most complicated I've made to date with 4 different states.  It was fun to plan out and figure out how to transition between states, what each state should act like.  I'm quite happy with the results.  And I really like how they scatter around the player when they reach them, it's kind of cute how they look like kids following their parent!

The environment was another fun challenge, the isometric angle in a proper 3d environment has problems, but those problems just need managed in the editor and yield some great effects.  Passing under gates, seeing the branches overhead, and seeing larger structures were all well worth the effort of making invisible trees that only cast shadows and testing every location for branches obscuring too much.

Mapping out the twisting maze was also hard, I ended up having to simplify it immensely to make it in only 2 weeks, but I'm still proud of the results.  But if I use this portal asset pack again I'm going to have to do some serious re-working to make it more usable.  Making custom materials for each possible state of if it's visible inside or outside of the given portal-state is painful when I just had 1 kind of portal.  And I still don't know what inverse means in any situation.
Luckily I have a few ideas how to re-work it into something more usable in the future, and I might have a few ideas on where I can use it in Skye's Repose, my main game.

And despite how shy I am and how I completely could not bring myself to ask for help, it was really cool to see everyone's game and see their works in progress and discuss them!  Cats make perfect ice breakers!

The music was really fun!  I don't know if it was too much, but I really like the vibe it sets.  Adding an echo, and an underlay of the same song slowed down creepily slow...  In my testing, there was a moment of the main theme quieting down, hearing this creepy undertone, and feeling relief as the main theme picks back up to mask that undertone once more.  It captured what I wanted from the music perfectly.
But I did add a button to disable that mix because at the time of writing it I had a headache, and hearing the song WRONG like that was not helping.  I'm not sure how unpleasant it is to listen to, and I didn't have time to really figure that out.  So instead I opted to just add that button.

Now to share this on my Twitter, and start reviewing everyone else's games!  There are so many great games this jam, I'm excited to try them all out!  Or as many out as I can at least.