I can’t believe how tired I am today. I went out of coffee this weekend and I was too tired to buy some more today – thats how tired I am

Anyways. I made a game, using Unreal Engine 4 this weekend. Not everything went as planned for my first LD entry, but I am happy with it.

The Game

You control a UFO with lunar lander type of controls, only one engine to apply thrust upwards and you have to cancel each movement out with a counter thrust, so you basically fly like a helicopter.

The goal is to grab a bit of building material and deliver it into the building zone of the bridge until it is finished. So far so good, I had the theme down.

link: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=40589

The World

The world consists of many small to medium sized floating islands. I planned to populate them with a species that struggled to visit their friends and families that lived on another island. But I had to cut the population for time reasons (only indicators are the hot air balloons).

The Good Things

• I like how challenging it is, I love challenging games in general, gives you a bit of satisfaction beating them.
• I made something that looked good, for me as a software engineer, art is always the hardest part.
• I MADE A GAME AND RELEASED IT

The Bad Things

• you guys don’t seem to like the controls or how challenging it is
• I had no time to build up a proper communication with the player. I can not tell you why or how you are supposed to build a bridge. With the knowledge I have about Usability and User Experience, I am not happy with the result.
• I had to cut a lot of cool gameplay mechanics due to time reasons 😛
• The building material makes no sense at all, you basically grab rocks and throw them at a bridge to build it 😛

Conclusion

For my next LD, I will probably do something smaller, probably 2D to implement a bit more stuff. But actually I am really happy with the outcome of this one, even though it has it’s flaws.

Timelapse

I recorded pretty much every second (minus the hour my internet crapped out) and I made a little timelapse. 30 hours of work compressed to 18min.

I couldn’t make is shorter, it is already way too fast to not get headache watching it 😛

Tags: postmortem, timelapse, ue4, Unreal Engine 4