Stupid Citizen | PostMorterm
I had the good idea to wait the end of LD to get sick.
But even from my bed, I can still make a post mortem of this Ludum Dare 40.
The Game
Day 1
So Saturday morning, arrived in time to the office to prepare before the theme announcement (11am in Japan)... and it started well, my windows decided by himself to do a big update and block the computer for 30 min ...
Except that, I was a bit disappointed by the theme, because I was clearly more inspired by "You are not the main character" or "Death is useful".
Anyway, it took me ~1h to decide what to do, and here is a list of few other ideas: * a tactical with zombies, every time you make sounds, more zombies join the horde * a cat cafe manager with a lot of cats * based on the LD tweet gif, an action game with a flamethrower and lots of spiders ^^ * a hikikomori game (visual novel), more sun you received, weaker you become * a salaryman simulator where you have more and more work stacking on your desk, and you have to avoid dying from karoshi
I decided to avoid subjects a bit too much Japanese or that requires a lot of art, and finally I decided to make a city builder.
Spend some time drawing on the whiteboard, took a coffee and finally started in Google doc and magica voxel to create the basic map:
Around 3pm I finally opened unity for the first time of the weekend, quickly created a project with my basic setup (2017.2, visual studio 2017, c#6, resharper, dotween, unity cinemachine, post processing stack, ...) The rest of the day was pretty straightforward.
Just wasted a bit of time with the unity navmesh system (pathfinding), but mostly because I don't have much experience with this component. And at the end of the day, I had the basic mechanic:
Day 2
Sunday was a good day, I was really efficient. I got the game states, menu, and cameras integrated in less than 2 hours. My biggest issue was related to lightning, some of my shadow were not baked and I was around 500 draw call mostly for the shadows ... took me 2-3h to find a decent solution which looks good enough and has good performance.
Except that, I spend half of my day making models for each type of building and working on those icons.
At the end of the day I was kinda happy, but it was not really polish and there was still no sound
Day 3
Monday, I forgot to take a day off so I had to go to work.
I saved every minute possible to work on the game (skipped lunch, stopped early). I managed to add lots of sound effect, smoke particles, water shader, make the UI more obvious, added the red arrow and work a bit on the game balance. I got my first feedback less than 6 hours before the final build, which help me to improve a bit the game feel.
I also spend a bit of time on tooling, for example a simple component to randomize my props (tree, flowers, ...)
After that upload on itch.io, realized it was the wrong build, repupload and the game was online 10 hours before the deadline ~2AM.
First time I use this website to publish a game and it's really user friendly :thumbsup:
Conclusion
This LD40 was a good experience and I'm happy with what I managed to deliver. There are still few small bugs, not obvious ui or missing explanation but except that, it works quite well.
If I had to redo it, what I would like to change: * ask for feedback earlier in the development * spend more time training on third-party tools before (like magica voxel this time) * not doing it alone (too much art, models and sounds to make and integrate for a developer like me /o\ )
Sorry, this post is a bit longer than expected ^^