Well, regardless of how the voting goes, I consider my effort a failure. I’ll explain why after breaking down the issues…
What went right
Theme – I drew a blank on interesting game mechanics for “Alone”, so decided to go for a mood piece with fairly conventional mechanics (especially since we had a new category just for that). I was happy with the general mood of the game.
Mechanics – I created a handful of simple scripts that I could re-use to quickly add objects and interactions. This really helped in the final few hours, even though I lost a lot of that work.
Art style – I was initially going for a desaturated, pastel look rather than completely grayscale. I abandoned this on day two because it was taking far too much time twiddling the colours to try to get the look I wanted. Grayscale was much simpler to implement and I felt it turned out more dramatic too.
What went wrong
Too much art – I spent the vast majority of my time building and lighting the environment. It’s pretty, I guess, but when I look at what other entries did using much simpler art, I feel that was wasted time.
Art first – I build most of the environment on Saturday, tweaked and polished on Sunday morning, and only started adding simple puzzles on Sunday afternoon. This was exceedingly stupid.
Not enough to do – the flip side of overdoing the art. There’s only three simple fetch puzzles to do, and no proper ending, which is pathetic. Because I wanted to make a story-driven experience and had already designed much of the enivronment, I struggled to come up with logical puzzles. At the last minute I realised that they could be emotional blocks rather than physical barriers to leaving, but didn’t have time to properly evoke that.
No backups – during submission hour, Unity crashed and corrupted the terrain data I’d spent the bulk of day 1 sculpting. I had to revert to a test build I’d done an hour earlier. Sadly, in that hour I’d added a lot of additional text and a proper ending. Next time I’ll make backups and bank test builds at regular intervals.
In this shot you can also see the debug plane – a quad with a mist texture on it that slices through the landscape (most obvious above the doorway) showing where the player can move. I used this to help sculpt the terrain and place objects on it, and intended to delete it before submission. It’s a minor niggle, but it annoys me!
Self-analysis
The main reason I consider Lonely Island a failure is that I made ALL THE SAME MISTAKES as in LD21. Read the post-mortem for that one here.
You’d think because I’m a programmer by trade, I’d be able to knock up working game mechanics in a few hours. And I can, if I try. But that’s exactly what I do at work day-in, day-out. During Ludum Dare, I’d far rather play around with the art – it’s more fun, I learn new tricks and I get a pretty result a lot faster than with programming. And I guess that’s fine, if that’s what I wanted to do.
But what I really want out of Ludum Dare is to prove to myself that I can design and build my own games – not just implement highly-polished cogs that go into the big machine. And I’m failing at that because I’m doing the fun stuff instead of the important stuff.
So as far as I’m concerned, the theme of the next LD is “Self-Discipline”!
Play (Unity) | Ratings Page
