This was my first LD, and first attempt at using Unity. - https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/42/the-fall-of-arcology-one

Just before 11pm on Friday

"Please let it be Decay.."

11pm on Friday

"Oh. I hate this theme. I have no idea what to do."

Saturday

The initial ideas

After sleeping on it, it was initially down to something to do with Arcologies (a whole city inside a massive building), a Resident Evil 4 style inventory management game, or something to do with exploring space and founding a colony to escape overpopulation on Earth. My first thought with Arcologies was a Sim City style thing, until I remembered there was a SimTower game by Maxis during the 90s, and Tiny Tower has done it more recently. Then I starting thinking of a scene in a Neal Asher book where an Arcology is being destroyed and collapsing into the sea, so I settled on an escape platform game.

The first vision

This was to have been a single screen platformer that fills up with water, fire, or rubble, where the player has to get to an exit lift to get to the next floor avoiding obstacles and collapsing parts of the level. You'd be able to rescue trapped people for bonuses and shoot obstacles and the nihilist terrorists.

Getting started

So I booted up Krita. I started trying to draw a nice stylised character, but the higher resolutions meant I'd need to do more in the art department.

So I booted up Aseprite. 16x16 pixel sprites and tiles for the win.

For some reason the above png (and a few others) ends up having weird colours in Unity. Haven't been able to figure out why (if anyone knows please leave a comment).

By lunchtime I'd got the basic physics completed (copying and hacking code together from various other projects) and a test level. When messing around with the camera size, I found I preferred a zoomed in, claustrophobic, look and so I abandoned the idea of a single screen.

Then I went to spend time with my better half and our kids at the local shopping centre.

Saturday evening

After filling up on burrito and nachos in the town centre, I got back to the grindstone. I implemented the moving wall of fire and also a bullet firing mechanism which explode when they hit a wall.

Leaping into Beepbox (www.beepbox.co) I knocked up a basic tune (the song that plays in every level (sorry)) and got that playing.

By 11pm-ish I had the core of the game essentially complete. For Sunday I intended to implement the collapsing stuff, enemies, etc.

Sunday

From waking up at 6am-ish I spent several hours implementing death/retry screens and continue screens (learning about Unity UI stuff from scratch). I thought I could maybe make 30 levels during the day, but it turns out that level design is not as easy as I thought it would be.

More family time for a few hours (it was Pokemon GO's community day), and back to trying to design levels. Thanks to a couple of Unity crashes, and my own stupidity in not saving the scene, I lost a few versions of levels. It was close to 5pm and I realised I didn't have time to implement the enemies or the other obstacles (e.g. collapsing things, water, etc). A buggy version of the shooting (slow bullets) still exists if you press left-shift (I forgot to remove it).

I knocked up the ending level and tried to squeeze a few more levels in (there's only 8). Spent about an hour on that title screen (I found an amazing stylised line art picture of an arcology on Google and decided to rip off their style) and realised I needed an intro and outtro. Knocked up a couple of comic style pictures depicting the escape and the arcology exploding and ended up using them in a scrolling credits style (following a tutorial on youtube).

Build and submission

About 8pm I decided to learn how to build the executable. Creating a Windows build was easy enough, so I eagerly playtested it.

The collision detection physics no longer worked..

Desperately searching Google I discovered that Unity can sometimes mess up the collision mesh of tiles. Regenerating the mesh for the white outlines (the collision bits) solved the problem. Now 9:30pm.

Created an itch.io account and decided that it would probably be better to do a WebGL build. So I did.

It hung during the build process.

Restarted Unity. This time this seemed to complete, but the folder is empty. Restart computer, twice. No luck.

Just about 10:45pm I give up.

I upload the Windows build to itch.io, fill in the details and also submit on the LD site 10 minutes into the submission hour.

I crawl up to bed, ready to shed my weekend persona of game developer hero and revert to a mild-mannered technologist at a financial firm.

Tuesday

Find out that I didn't make the itch.io page public (because I was logged in I could view it without problems). Feel like an idiot.

Lessons learned

In hindsight using Unity was probably a mistake due to my unfamiliarity with the system. I should have stuck to Monogame where I could code everything myself and not have to work around the Engine/Editor and its API.
Like many others, I overscoped and ended up disappointed that I didn't achieve what I wanted to.

Level design is not easy. If lots of levels are needed then some of procedural generation should be done, or take part in the Jam rather than the Compo.

Next steps

I'd quite like to realise the original vision and make it into a disaster-movie-like escape game with more dynamic levels, obstacles and enemies. Also I'd like to fix those weird colour glitches.. (edit: looking closer at the screenshot at the top, in some of the tiles there does seem to somehow the 2 tone grid that Aseprite uses as the background. Maybe something odd with transparency?)