Game Description

Traverse inside the artificial planet fighting through strange violent technology. Defeat the class-3-entity within the labyrinth.

TECHNOCIDE is a turn based FPS game where you have to charge and shoot. Plan your moves against your enemies, they only move when you do. Unleash powerful attacks by charging more than once. There are 6 different fire modes to choose from, each requiring different amounts of charges.

• Game link: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/technocide

What have we learnt?

It's been a while since we've joined the previous Ludum Dare, which is Ludum Dare 36 back in August 2016. We're going with the same classic team again consisting only of Isaac and me. The following will break down into what both of us has learn over the course of this Ludum Dare.

Chan Pei Keong - (Programmer and music composer)

• Don't Rewrite Code If It Works - I used to rewrite codes a lot in order to reorganize it and squeeze out as many tiny optimizations as possible. This has hindered a lot of our progress before. Now I've decided to only do optimization on things that affect performance the most, which meant that we had to use a lot of copy pasted codes that are from our old projects. Most of our time, we focused on game feel and programmed features.
• Don't Judge The Music Without SFX - I have to admit, I'm not a very talented music composer. I was planning on not adding music at all after creating a second version of this song which still doesn't sound as good. However, after adding the sound effects, the music doesn't sound so bad afterwards, and people are praising it!
• Balancing By Testing - For game balancing, all we did was to play the game and test out the values until it feels right. It usually takes about 2-3 times balancing a single feature before it feels good. I've also learnt that people associate behavioral difference between two enemies even thought they were all using the same enemy class (interesting eh?).
• Avoiding Distraction - As for avoiding distractions, I've spammed DOOM 2016's OST over and over until my ears bleed. Plus it feels thematic to our game. I have also avoided Facebook or any sort of voice chat platforms and only rely on text chat on Discord.

Isaac Soong Bo Jun - (Artist and sound effects)

• Art wise. I think I've finally found what I'm good at, doing med sized pixel art. It looks like lower rez pixel art doesn't necessarily mean it's just easier and faster. So without a doubt, getting out of your comfort zone is never a bad idea. You'd probably find something useful or better than what you're used to. Feel free to break any art rules you see fit and don't be afraid of making it look bad for the sake of a placeholder. I did not limit my color palette for my art here. It took me a while to allow that to go into the final product. For good or bad, it seems to be well received. At least Nik isn't bellowing down on me for making bad art this time haha.

• Try to maintain an organized work ethic. I used to be diagnosed with ADD. Whether or not if it's a false positive, I still had issues getting focused on what I do. That basically makes it hard to work on anything. This was especially hard since I am working at a long distance with Nik with no one monitoring over my shoulder in case I just pause and daydream. So to solve that I find that having more distractions is probably the best way to get you undistracted. Spam music, spam audiobooks, spam just about anything really. Otherwise really you just need just remind yourself that you have work to do or you'll never do anything you really want. Imagine dying in the far future realizing you've never done what you've ever wanted.

• Never too late to thumbnail or make concept art So I am sure you can probably notice with our game, the art is a little inconsistent when it comes to the enemy designs and whatnot. They're supposed to be an alien of the same race, story wise. Now we have some blue guy with spikes on his back, a facehugger thing (Which used to look like a sperm, those 4 arms were added because we noticed that) and the boss was just a reddish naked guy that stares at you. Get some paper, and just thumbnail your stuff before proceeding with your characters. It was what made making the facehugger thing easier for me to do.

What Went Well?

1. Graphics - We've finally found an art style that Isaac is comfortable with and could pump out at a consistent rate. We're impressed at how much art we've produced in such a short time.
2. Gameplay - Not only that, we're also impressed by the amount of complicated game mechanics which we could fit into the game in under 3 days. Unfortunately, we had to cut about 2 features from the original plan (enemy recharging and player guarding).
3. Audio - We were expecting the audio to be the worst thing about this game but with the last minute music and sound effects added, they turned out to be decent. The reviewers praised it! Luckily we didn't cut the music out.
4. Game Scope - This game has probably the largest scope that we've ever made. However, after many years of making Ludum Dare games, we've matured and are now able to estimate how fast we can implement certain features. Thus, this is why we only have 2 cut features.
5. Game Feel - We've focused a lot more on the game feel by adding visual and auditory feedback and it paid off. The game feels like an actual game and we're proud of that.
6. Minimal bugs - Throughout the development, we've only experienced 2 major issues with the game, but they are all fixed very shortly (I'll say in less than 30 minutes). I'll associate that with our experience in games development and coding.
7. Rudimentary AI - We didn't have time to implement a full AI so we opted for basic AI that acts using basic rules with some randomization. However, they would sometimes get stuck behind a wall. This ended up being a good point since people believed the AI used a strategy on them by hiding behind the entrance to wait for player to come through to get attacked (in reality, they didn't have line of sight to the player, so they are actually stuck there). The second enemy behaves differently by rushing towards the player (even though they are all the same enemy class, including the boss). However, this creates an interesting strategy for players as they have to use the AOE Shockwave attack to hurt enemies that are hugging the walls at the entrance.
8. Successful Innovation - This time around, we've decided to make something totally different and has never been seen before (at least as far as we know), and we've successfully did it!

What Went Wrong?

1. Level Design - Due to our game scope, we had to design the levels at the last minute, and only tweak it when it doesn't feel right. People were getting lost easily as well. The level that actually got redesigned the most was the boss level.
2. Rudimentary AI - Unfortunately, since the boss is the same enemy class as the regular enemies, it made it harder to change his behavior so he ended up hugging the walls far too often instead of rushing towards the player. We had to make a lot of changes to the boss and the boss level in order to compensate for that.
3. Rushed Code - Because we have so much to code, we ended up hard-coding a lot of things, which meant that many things such as the boss are hard to change. This meant that there are a lot of unoptimized codes as well. At least the game still runs fine.
4. Zero Allocated Playtest - We didn't get to have the 3rd day to get people to test our game in order to balance the it so we ended up testing the game ourselves and balanced it based on our feel. We ended up missing a lot of things as expected.
5. Shoddy Balancing - Due to the lack of play testing allocated, the single shot was useless and healing was a little too overpowered.
6. Unpolished Art - The art was not planned well. There were some stray pixels as well floating in mid air ingame.
7. Menu And Tutorials - We made the end screen, menu and tutorials at the last minute, therefore all of it were just texts and graphics. The tutorial screens were too heavy and we could have made it look more simpler.

Play Our Game!

In short, this is probably the largest Ludum Dare game we've ever created so far. It was super stressful and we had very little sleep while developing it. We hope that you guys will come and enjoy our latest game for Ludum Dare!

• Game link: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/technocide