“This time let’s take it easy and make a simpler game” – famous last words of a Ludum Dare 32 participant.
What Have We Created?! is not only the title of our game, but also sums up some of the emotions we felt towards it a few hours prior to submission. Our game idea was deceptively simple – let the player create a monster and unleash it on a city – but actually proved a lot more fiddly to implement that we had anticipated, and we were caught at the 11th hour panicking about what could be cut out so we could submit on time.
What went right – Becky’s music came out really well this time, mashing up the “Bwooooom” movie trailer sound to create a really atmospheric track for the monster launch. Alex achieved an impressive amount code wise, made all the more impressive by the fact that she only started using Unity a few weeks ago. Even if the game could have used a few more hours tweaking, there is a lot going on behind the scenes with the monster building section. In terms of graphics, I am pretty pleased with the how the cityscape turned out.
What went not so right – There was a lot the never got put in the game that we would have liked to add or finish. We wanted to put tanks and choppers into the city portion of the game (indeed the graphics were done) but we ran out of time to implement the enemies properly. Also its pretty clear from the feedback we’ve had that its unclear to some players quite how the monster fits together and that there are too many of certain kinds of tiles spawning – easy things for us to fix but we simply didn’t have time to get that level of polish. Plus a million-billion bugs.
Had I done the project again, I would have held off making the lab background so busy – it would have worked as well or better with a much simpler design, leaving me with more time to help Alex with exporting and tweaking.
This is our third LD, and in many ways this project was our most ambitious. Our aim was to beat our previous rankings (#42 overall for both entries) but judging from the feedback so far, it seems our game has been less well received than before. If nothing else, this project has been a success in helping us learn the work flow for Unity, so fingers crossed our next jam will go a little smoother.
And next time we will be making a pong clone.
Please play and rate our game.
Thanks to those who have already done so.