Ludum Dare 23

PLAYTHROUGH VIDEO

TIME-LAPSE WITH COMMENTARY

POST-MORTEM

What Went Right

1. Took It Easy

This was by far the most relaxed I’ve been for a Ludum Dare 48 in the 5 times I’ve attempted it. Partly that was due to experience, and the growing of level of mastery over the tools, but a lot more had to do with an overall feeling of resignation. Previously I’d felt like there was a chance to win the event, even going up against giants like Notch and deepnight, but with 1400+ games for entrants to sift through it’s become something of a parody of the competition it may have once been. Perhaps it was always folly to think that winning was a possibility, maybe it was just a fire and forget sort of thing from the start. This Dare marked a big change in attitude for me.

2. Substance

I finally used Allegorithmic’s Substance Designer, and it was super effective! Pre-audio, the project file was 300KB. This is absolutely tiny, even by Flash game standards, considering the game had full bump-mapped specular-mapped textures. Substances put the load on the player’s CPU instead of memory, and there’s some risk of losing players with lower-end tech, but I intentionally kept everything simple and exported from Unity at the lowest settings. It’s hard to argue that the game isn’t pretty, and it runs on netbooks.

3. Followed Through on the Idea

As with the previous entries I applied brute force to the initial idea I had, hammering away at the hot iron like a sweating blacksmith until something began to form. I suppose in the future I’ll be able to try more kinds of ideas at the beginning, but I attribute the success of my previous entries at seeing the thing through to the end. It’s easy to want to abandon an idea because of feelings that it wouldn’t work, but to me the ultimate goal of Ludum Dare 48 is publishing a game after 48 hours and in order to do that certain sacrifices need to be made.

4. No Democracy for Me

This was the first time I went on a Ludum Dare media blackout in the week leading up to the compo. I didn’t want to have any idea what the theme might have been. I wanted to be floored, absolutely shocked by what the theme was. It was great, like coming to a big feast with a perfectly clear palette. Obviously if no one voted there wouldn’t be a theme, but the chances of that happening are pretty much nil. I recommend it, and I’m going to be taking this approach for future theme-based competitions.

What Went Wrong

1. Apathy

The feeling that there wasn’t really any point to doing it pervaded the entire compo for me. It could have had a lot to do with the background noise in my life as well, but that thrill of competition just wasn’t there for me this time, and I think it may have prevented me from really trying to cram in some of the advanced features that I wanted.

2. Me No Know NGUI

I picked up Tasharen’s NGUI a few days before the compo with the intention of having some really nice, polished menus for the entry. In the past I’d spent what I’d felt was too long fussing with Unity’s GUI system to get the menus right. I know how to animate and draw them effectively, it’s just a time-consuming process. NGUI seemed like and still seems like a really good time-saver. Unfortunately I couldn’t get a handle on it in time for the compo and ended up hand-coding the menus again.

3. Font Fail

I find that for compos choosing a font early helps set the tone of the project. I wanted something playful and child-like, so I grabbed Just Me Down Here Again from Google Web Fonts. It’s very clean and readable at higher resolutions, but not so much at the small stage I set for the project. By the time I realized it wasn’t going to be comfortable for most players, it was too late to make adjustments (another risk with hand-coding GUI).

4. Un-Documentation

In past entries I’d been pretty good at documenting my progress here on the blog and elsewhere. This time I just sort of said “screw it” after a day and ended up simply posting a few screenshots to Twitter. Whether this was a failure or not is debatable. On the one hand there’s no step-by-step record of my process. On the other I saved a bunch of time and headache.

LIVE UPDATES

0:00:00 “Tiny World” is the theme. Diverse. Lots of room for pretty much everything. Here we go.

0:02:00 Two hours in and I’ve got the base platform for the “world” in place. Feeling kinda zonked though, think I might call it an early night and get a fresh start on things tomorrow morning.

0:10:30 Woke up from a good, solid 8-hour sleep. The idea I went to bed with is still firmly stuck in my head, the only real worry being if it’s enjoyable or not. I guess we’ll build it and see.

[Lost content, image: alt-text “Gizmos”]

0:12:57 Just spent an hour aligning pivots with normals so that things looked proper. Hopefully this will allow for tons of smooth interaction now.

(I gave up on live-updating after the above entry. –Ed.)

SCREENSHOTS

(There was a deck of dozens of screenshots stored on a Google service that no longer exists. –Ed.)

PROJECT STATUS

2012.04.20 – 2012.04.23

Previous: DARKADE
Home
Next: Project Prevengeance