It’s here

Don’t be wack, play it!

This was an interesting and different Ludum Dare for me. Earlier I had participated only with a team and with quite lot of planning and organizing. This time I just happened to check the theme 6 hours after the jam had already started and just decided to wing it and try to hack a game together with the limited time and resources I had.

I started by prototyping a bit of hitman-esque stealth stuff and was gonna originally make a little game where you have to identify your target in a crowd and somehow kill him. As I have almost no experience in anything to do with modeling or drawing, I tried to create a lot of different blocky cube characters with different colored shirts and small details but the game ended up looking like a mess. As I made all the NPC:s look relatively similar, the idea of the game changed from killing one target to killing them all.

By day 2 I had already implemented all the mechanics I had planned and could focus on other stuff. I had limited time to use on the game so I decided to focus all the attention on honing the atmosphere and the mood. Little changes to camera effects and sound effects slowly built up into a much much darker game that I had originally planned it to be. I started with relatively colorful scene and ended up with this grayscale horror game. I also came up with the name and the little back story for the game after seeing how different it had become. You were an actual monster feeding on humans during the night.

For a long time I thought the game wasn’t gonna be anything good but eventually was pleased with the result that I ended up with. It was kinda weird process where I never really knew what the game was gonna be like until it was finished. Still a good experience in developing a game this way, even if it’s not the best way.

You can play the game here: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=39351

I’m finally got something working on my serial killer game where these innocent glasses-wearing red shirt cubes walk down the street, not knowing there is a monster amidst them. You can now stabby stab stab those poor cubes in their little cube heads and bodies. Also the rest will run if they see you kill their fellow cube. Not sure how much gameplay I’ll get done but at least there’s some meat over the bones now.

So after a bit of reflecting on our work I decided it would be good to write some thoughts down. I’ve read all the comments on our page and noticed a couple of recurring things, both positives and criticism.

We were really happy with the sounds and the overall juice in our game and it’s great to see that people who played the game enjoyed them too. The sound effects have received nothing but praise and the little screen shakes and flashes were also very well received. Also our background music has received much praise. The original intent was to have a film grain/sepia filter on the game to make the ragtime music fit better, but after finding out there isn’t a way to do it without the screen effects on Unity Pro, we scrapped that idea. The music stayed though, and it’s nice to see people liking it.

While praises and pats on the back are always nice to hear, the criticism and suggestions by the community are the most important aspect. The feature that received the most criticism was our decision to completely randomize all drops, a feature that in hindsight we could have implemented much better. We always wanted to have a random drop system but at the moment, the game is affected too much by the randomized drop chance of the portal element, the power-up which allows the player to progress in the game. Some people have had it drop so early each level that it only took them a very short time to complete the whole game, which of course is not an ideal situation.

Otherwise the criticism and praise has gone very even. Difficulty could’ve been lower for some people and for some people it was just right. Most people complimented the controls but we had also complaint of them being too slow. Enemies with patterns, better scaling enemies and polished art have also been wished for. From my point of view, all of it is fair and constructive. This was our first ludum dare and the level of comments has surprised me, all the criticism is reasonable and presented in a correct manner. This makes it very easy to pinpoint the good and the bad in the game, which is ideal.

We’ve had some preliminary talks of continuing the development of the game in the future but that remains to be seen. I thank all the people who played, rated and commented on the game because it makes the possible further development much easier. Everyone who hasn’t still tried it, here’s the link if you fancy yourself some arcade shooting.