August 2012
August 27, 2012
Come on Dare Me, Dare Me a Little Farther
_If you know both your pronunciation & your Dr. Hook, the title of this post should make perfect sense.
I’ll make this short & supplement it with pictures.
Another Ludum Dare 48 (LD48) has come & gone. It was the sixth one in a row I entered, and the sixth one in a row I submitted a working game to.
For those of you not in the know, the LD48 is a timed competition where solo game developers vie to complete a working game in 48 hours or less. Oh, and there’s a community-voted theme but that’s more or less optional.
If you’ve never done it, then you can’t appreciate how difficult it is to do this. There are varying degrees of success, and they can be ranked in this order:
- Submitted a game at the deadline.
- The game can be installed/accessed by a wide array of players.
- The game has a playable loop.
- The game has graphics and/or audio.
- The game conveys what the developer set out to communicate.
There’s a couple more points I like add so that if I don’t manage to nail any of the later bullets I can still call it a success:
- The game isn’t a platformer.
- The game makes the player wonder how it was built in such a short timeframe.
The above are my definitions, as the competition itself isn’t particularly rigid in its enforcement of the rules. And as it’s all based on community trust, it’s not outside of the realm of possibility that someone could work on a game for a whole year and then submit at the deadline of a given compo. There’d be no way to know.
I don’t do this. I work across those 48 hours and come out the other side with a game.
Here’s the skinny on LD48 no.24:
WHAT WENT RIGHT
1. Apolitics
I didn’t vote, didn’t look at the themes. I assumed there was one or two about kittens in the running, but for the most part I didn’t care to check. Coupled with my recent decision to stop the majority of the social network trawling, I was in the dark about what the theme would be until the moment it was announced. I had a clean slate from which to start development. It was glorious.
2. Tools Mastery
I’ve spent the last few months really digging deep into Allegorithmic’s Substance & Autodesk’s CAT tools. Substance is a procedural texturing program that can produce life-like results using vector-based math & iteration. It’s expensive, but it’s paid for itself a few times over & I expect it to continue to do so. The final size of “EVOL” was 700kb before sound. The space saved on textures is massive, and for web-building this is a huge boon. The only downside is if your player’s graphics card isn’t up to snuff they’re not going to have a good time with your game. CAT is an auto-rigging tool within 3D Studio Max that makes animation of 3D models a breeze.
3. Simplification Process
The initial design underwent only a few iterations, & those were all prunings of features. I started from a wide enough base that by the end of the 48 hours my process looked a lot like an inverted pyramid with a functioning game at the fulcrum.
WHAT WENT WRONG
1. Shit Controls
Yes, they’re bad. They function well if your brain handles isometry or if your computer has a gamepad plugged into it. At the top tier of any development are two key components – Camera & Controls. I freely admit the controls are weak. It’s an easy enough fix, just not one I focused on before submitting my entry.
2. Shit Collision
The core feature of the game is resource gathering to upgrade abilities. I went with a combination raycast-collider system that works as intended but is frustrating as hell. Perhaps a friction fix would make it a bit easier to glom onto resource nodes, but it was overlooked in the final submit. The game works, and is “winnable”, but it is a very uncomfortable experience.
3. Unnecessary Day/Night Cycle
It looks cool, but does nothing for the game. It’s a little sad that I fell victim to this too, as it’s one of the mantras from my art development days – “looks cool is NOT a design choice”. Oh well.
So there it is. It’s my highest level of technical achievement so far in an LD48, and I know it’s going to lose tons of points for shit controls & a core feature that hurts the player to execute, but it’s complete & playable. Considering that the attrition rate for competitors in this event is huge, it would be great to get the recognition for completing the event, but at the end of the day it’s just a 48-hour lesson in game development, and by that metric I learned as much as anyone else who competed.
See you in a few months for Ludum Dare 48 no.25! The streak will continue.
2012.08.01 – 2012.08.30