Hey all,
Firstly hope all went well with your compo and jam games and I hope you all enjoyed the development.
First note is that Team RobKat is a newly formed game development team, im joined by a new to the industry artist and designer, Katrina Reynolds. Much props to her as she quickly picked up all the niggles game development throws at you 😀
This weekend we developed a game called Grand Theft Crimbo using Unity, originally we were going to call it The Epic Robbery That Ruined Xmas AKA Grand Theft Crimbo but we decided to keep it simple.
The game is about an elf wronged by Santa, the story is kept open for players to imagine. Just know this, this elf is angry, super evil angry. His trusty sidekick, evil goat, drives his sleigh as you terrorise a small village near you evil lair. The plan is to steal presents and not get caught so Santa looks like he didn’t bother with presents this year.
What Went Right
As mentioned before we our a new team and it went really well, we worked cohesively and it was great fun.
We managed to develop most of the mechanics we wanted, stealing presents, driving a sleigh, basic collision, avoiding police.
Most of the graphics required for the game were made in time, its a shame we didnt have time to make the lair, individual house and village decorations but as a game prototype were happy.
Prior to the LD25 jam we decided to do a creative exercise where each voting round we would come up with 5 ideas for each theme, thats 240 game ideas. It really helped us to get into the creative mind set and we also now have 10 other really good game ideas to experiment with.
What Went Wrong
TileMapping – Boy did I not know how complex a tile mapping system can be. I started by creating a script to plugin prefabs for tiles, but soon realised even a small tilemap has a large number of individual tiles, meaning I would have to make every tile as a prefab and I can guarantee the performance would have sucked. What I really wanted was a system like RPGMaker but there wasnt a chance in homers noggin I was going to complete a system like that in time. Of couse there was always the option of using rpgmaker to make the game and that certainly would have saved time but we really wanted to have the game playable on a web page. Ive seen the work some people have been doing with a html5 port of rpgmaker but the api seemed complex and not something I had time to learn.
Unity was not without its difficulty though, ive been using unity for just over a year and im fairly confident but there were 2 things during this jam that really stumped me, thankfully the unity community is awesome and a quick google search sorted the problems. One of the problems was activating disabled game objects with children.
It wasn’t just unity specific problems that stumped me though, in fact occasionally I made my own problems, there was this really annoying situation where the police car wasnt changing animation cel, it didn’t even show any graphic. I went over and over my code which I had ripped from my other code for the character. The problem was in the fact that the code did something specific for the character but I needed it to work another way for the police car. Turns out the code I was trying to get working was in a custom function and not in an Update(), Doh 
Unfortunately the game was released with bugs and there’s quite a few, Its been suggested in the comments for a post-compo version with all the problems fixed and while were at it we should add some more features, were definitely up for this and hopefully in the next few weeks we should have something to release 
Improvements
The tilemapping situation presents an intricate problem which I will need to sit down and plan a strategy to attack it, there are two ways, tackle the problem myself or find a third party software. Actually theres a third way and as im writing this I think I might go with this one. A measure of the two. I have been using Pyxel Edit for a while now and I think its amazing, but it too like our game has many bugs and could benefit from some much needed features. If possible I will see if I can offer my programming skills to enable the development to move forward. A key feature(already in Pyxel edit) is export as xml/text. Using this I could develop a content processor making the whole tilemapping process smooth and trouble free.
As previously said were going to fix the bugs and release a post-compo version.
Were super excited about going back through the game and adding polish like xmas decor for the houses and village.
Its been great fun, hope you enjoy the game:P
Team RobKat (Katrina Reynolds, Rob Yates)
