Eiradirian Wormfare
Okay, first time I did the jam rather than the compo. I still mostly worked alone, but had some assets made by a friend and used lots of CC0 and CC-BY stuff from OpenGameArt.
It was clearly the most fun, but also the most tiring Ludum Dare for me. Due to timezone issues I only got like 4 hours of sleep the first day, second day it was 5 hours. I stayed up way too long too, my first work day was 24 hours long. The day after it was over I was pretty much dead. Didn’t do anything, had a headache and dropped down asleep very early.
But even though I worked pretty much throughout all of my awake-time (I did do 1-2 breaks of at least 30 minutes every day), it got pretty tight towards the end. Levels needed to get setup properly, dialogues needed to be implemented, and The Romanian didn’t even have his special ability yet. I implemented that in the last 10 minutes, along with the Credits screen. Was pretty awesome, coding at super-speed.
So in contrast to my last entry, this is probably my best Ludum Dare entry so far. First time I made a platformer too. In fact, I like how the game turned out so much that I’m considering a post-jam version. More levels, more Wormsweave content (that was planned initially, but time was like “nah man”). An arena mode, achievements, collectibles. Controller support…and if I’m really crazy, Multiplayer Support (this game would play nice in COOP).
What went right:
- Audio: First time I didn’t have to make music myself or using some auto-generator. Nor did I have to make shooting sounds with my voice this time!
- Idea: I wanted to make another Eiradirian game. When the theme was announced, I had no idea how to properly put Eiradirian into that context. Then I thought of worms and made them the friendly quest-givers in an invaded underground realm.
- Code: The same as with other Ludum Dare games. The first two days I produced high quality and beautiful code that allowed me to add new things easily. Then on Day 3 I lost my sanity and produced weird crazy stuff.
- Graphics: Good thing I grabbed Kenney’s Donation Pack earlier, it had just the tiles we needed for our levels. Also used his platformer player character as a base for our characters.
- Visual Effects: Lighting, lots of particle effects (my favorite is the force field) and I even used a shader for the first time (the ASCII effect when nearing a wormhole). Learned a lot of new things.
What went wrong:
- Timelapse: Oh come on, I forgot to timelapse day three. Anyways, I just downloaded all 15 hours of footage and am going to render it as a timelapse, so it’s not that bad.
- Tutorial: I always forget that the people who are gonna play my game won’t have the bonus of working on it for 3 days. What seemed obvious to me got others stuck before even getting to the first levels.
That’s it. Try my game here (it’s fun). Or check out the prequel (also fun but not looking as good) and see how much difference that extra jam day made.
