One Minute of Light Complete & Link

I apologize but I did not post on my blog once my Ludum Dare 28 entry was completed, I made the lion shares of my live blogging on the Ludum Dare wordpress site as those are carried in a feed there.

You can  check the game description and play link out on the Ludum Dare site here

The first thing to know is I changed the name over night as I had come up with the theme that you were in a graveyard and had to escape ; and your torch only would last for one minute (Which fits the competition theme of  "You Only Have One" ).

Eventually as the design became apparent that light was much more important than the fact you were in a graveyard I decided to rename it to "One Minute of Light"

I also wanted to recap what I thought went well and could have done better after the break!




Firstly while it took me a while to come up with an idea because I did not like the theme in the end I was fairly happy with it.  It forced me to be creative in a way that I don't usually have to do.  I think thats good - I do honestly feel that you are obligated to occasionally do things outside of your comfort zone to effect personal growth.  Forcing yourself to come up with ideas outside of your personal favorite box is a great way to do that.

So for the recap its important to keep in mind that for Ludum Dare you have two days to make a complete game from scratch ; all by yourself!  This alone is a huge challenge ; so when I talk about things I could have done about better what I really mean in all contexts is specifically what I could have done better with such a crazy and normally uncalled for time constraint!

Things I could have done better:

1: I had intended to animate my models and in the end I did not have time.  What I could (and should) have done better was model them in an 'action pose' rather than a da vinci pose.  This way they would have been more useable by moving them around via code rather.  In the end when I finally figured out animation was not going to happen I went back and had to manually repose the characters which took extra time and was done probably more poorly than it needed to be had I done it when I was doing the initial modelling in the first place.

The characters arms are permanently reaching forwards!

2:  No Sounds!  I should have implement sounds "as I went" and I would have had a few sounds in the game. I ended up recording approximately 12 sounds that could have been put in but I left it until the end and I kept prioritizing other tasks as more important so in the end I had no sound in the game.  Having no sound at all hurt a lot more than having a low amount of sounds would have and I might have prioritized it differently if I knew I wasn't going to have time to do any at all.

3: Poor implementation of a few important game mechanics!  I'll have to bullet this item as it had several important sub items.  But basically in short because I was so rushed several game play mechanics were poorly implemented and resulted in either confusing or bad game play mechanics like the player being damaged when he could not tell the reason (the zombies reach was too far beyond their physical model).

• Zombies reach was much farther than their model lead you to believe
• Zombies should have walked up to you; then paused and had an animated attack that gave you a moment to dodge away.  Instead they attack the instant they are in range making it very difficult to avoid damage.
• The light should have a pickup that lets you recharge it!
• The player weapon ended up being a white box which was supposed to have been a pick or a shovel or some other weapon; this made it too obviously where the 'hitbox' was and looked dumb.
• My camera implementation was confusing causing the scene to spin around the player; I should have just had the player turn not the scene.

There are probably some other things that I could add but honestly for a 2 day game jam thats a nice list that might have been possible and made the game more fun.

The lighting and shadows looked great!

What worked well!

1:  The game idea I had of having a limited amount of light in a graveyard and using atmospheric lighting and shadows to create a nice environment really worked well. I could not be happier with how it looked for such a short amount of time and effort.   As you can see in the screenshot above there is a lot of dark around the player but the immediate area around them is well lit. This creates some dynamic tension  about light to start off with.    You immediately realize that you can't see everything very well. And once you meet your first zombie you realize that you really do want to see everything!   Then you realize that the light is running out and you can not have it on all the time!  Tension goes up another notch at this point.  Having some music and sounds that help augment this would be really cool additions if I work this idea out further in the future.

2: It was part of my design that all the white stone graveyard props should be visible even when  your light is off.  I had a blue scene light that provided a low level of ambient light.   The problem for the player is that this is not enough light to see the zombies either at all or well (this depends on your personal screen brightness settings).  

On my screen it was very well tuned and I was able to rush around the graveyard snapping my light off and on from time to time to make sure I wasn't about to die from a zombie.   Once again sound could have been a great addition here.  The louder the zombie sound the closer the zombie ; and this would prompt you to turn on your light!  Lots of great potential that worked out and could be taken even farther.

3: Using Unity 3D was actually a risk for me as I had only every completed 1 tutorial project on it before and have been learning to use it recently.   I am  also working on my first 'real' game in Unity also so I do have my 'feet wet' so to speak but I really wasn't sure how I would do in a 2 day competition with a tool that I did not know very well yet?

The answer is that I did great and it really worked out! Unity is well documented and fairly easy to use if you have a bit of programming or scripting experience.  I was able to fully realize my idea and Unity was largely an 'enabler' rather than an obstacle.  Certainly I had a few dozen times where I did not know how to implement a specific item but their API documentation on the website usually cleared that up immediately and I was able to move forward.

Summary:

In summary I really enjoyed the Ludum Dare 28 ; I can't say I will take time to do it every time ; but I will certainly do another one in the future.

- punchy out