Is should note that I’m developing my entry, Against the Wall, into a full game. You can check out my progress on the game’s new site. I’ll post a non-compo webplayer there in the near future.
Now for some self-analysis: On the Friday evening of the competition, I initially tossed around a number of ideas that in retrospect look like the ramblings of a madman. The best one was about a herd of cattle that get telekinetic powers and rampage through a city. Not wanting to do the animation for that, I eventually settled on something simpler: a 3D platformer where the player must climb something by using a special item that forms ledges. I was hoping for something Mirror’s Edge style with the platforming, but the eventual hasty execution of that game mechanic left something to be desired.
I made a bunch of boxes, wrote some C# code that made them react to the player’s input, and limited this input by requiring the acquisition of a special item. What the item was, I had no idea at this point. I was wavering between a tk glove or a magnetic device before calling it a magic wand and moving on.
Saturday began with a texture hunt. I grabbed a digital camera and took pictures of some marble and granite surfaces in a nearby park. Other elements photographed were a blue bath towel, a bookcase, and a random metal box. I applied the stone textures to the boxy models which I created the night before with Blender.
For the procedural world, I bit off more than I could chew. The number of bricks that would exist on even a small chunk of the wall would quickly add up into the thousands, causing my PC to chug. I spent almost all of Saturday on this feature.
Sunday started with mesh creation. I made a model for the quest giver and faced him away from the player’s starting point, so that the player may initially think it was a human silhouette in the distance. I pinned a note to him (that pops-up and goes away far too quickly) that quoted the theme of the competition, and placed the wand in front of him. I crafted the city-ledge high above the player, made fake walls for the unplayable areas, and scripted some code that would trigger the player’s “winning” of the game. Problem is, I didn’t test it. The blocks that I had placed in a gap under the city that were supposed to be movable were prevented from moving due to a glitch. Imagine my surprise when I found out that my compo entry couldn’t be beaten!
The take-away? Primarily, I need to budget my time better. I spent almost all of Saturday on my ambitious procedural generator. Placing the bricks by hand would have been well enough and would have taken less time. I should have focused more on the platforming gameplay and level design. Second, I should have set aside the last few hours of the compo for testing my game. Instead, I left everything to the last moment, resulting some major bugs. Third, I went into an eleventh-hour panic when I couldn’t log into my server and Dropbox was my only alternative, then panicked because I did not load it in the right compression format, then panicked that I didn’t initially put up a webplayer, ending-breaking bug, etc. In other words, I need to chill out.
The competition was a fun challenge, and its constraints forced me to think outside the box and make something unique and interesting. My objective now is to flesh-out the game world with some story, add a variety of gameplay mechanics, and form this mess of hastily assembled code into a game.
Please take the time to play and criticize the compo entry. If you like what you see, you can follow my progress on Against the Wall ‘s site.