Alright, it's time to do one of these again!

The Idea

This was my 4th Ludum Dare and it was probably the best one, to be honest. Once I saw the theme, I knew I wanted to go for a fighting game because, you know, currency to buy upgrades, and life is crucial in any type of combat. With this in mind, my friends helped me brainstorm and the words "arena" and "paying for weapons" started to pop up with a few ideas. "Boxhead" (it's an older, flash game) started to come up in my mind as I thought about this and so I decided to use it as my main inspiration. Here's what the first prototype looked like (around the 2 hour mark):

The Execution

The Code

Honestly, everything went WAY smoother than what it should have. If you look at my source code, it is one of the messiest things I have ever designed (I still got confused creating weapons even after creating like 5 of them).

These past few weeks, I had been trying to improve my code to automate most of my day-to-day tasks. Because of this, I noticed that my prototyping skills, where you don't really have the time nor need to automate stuff, are completely gone, so I had to hard-code a ton of stuff (don't even ask me about how I did the character rotation, it's not pretty). BUT, everything still worked fine, and what didn't was fixed in an hour or so, which is not bad at all.

What Went Well:

• The core code got done super quickly, which gave me time to focus on art and sound (usually never happens);
• Even though it's not pretty, I'm pretty happy with my combat design since it was my first time making any type of shooter AND any type of top-down;

What Went Bad:

• My code is so ugly that I will give $10 to anyone that can explain me how it works.

The Art

I'll be honest, I was just purely lazy on this one.

I'm not known for my art skills, that's for sure. For some reason, I ran into several problems when I tried to set up some simple animations and I didn't want to get frustrated in the first few hours of the jam, so I moved on and actually enjoyed the way it was, so, yeah :shrug_tone1:

What Went Well:

• Even though I still don't consider it "good", it is a major improvement on my previous jams and games in general, especially in the UI design;

What Went Bad:

• Couldn't implement animations
• The game was still not as visually appealing as I wished it was

The Sound

My mics have been pretty messed up the past few months, so I ran into the problem of how I would make SFX. I usually am against this, but hey, I was desperate and went to "Freesound" and got some good enough SFX from there.

The music was all me though, and I am actually proud of those 3 pieces I managed to make during Day 2!

What Went Well:

• I'd consider my music to be decent, overall. One of the songs is a pump song, the other is slightly eerie, and the other one is just calm, yet unsettling, which I was pleased with.

What Went Bad:

• Mic situation, I could've made some artificial SFX, but I just don't think that would've fit this game.

Conclusion

Honestly, I loved making "We Pay In Blood" and it's the most complete I have ever felt after a jam, even if the theme wasn't really my favourite one.

• The code was smooth, even if ugly.
• The art got improved, which was actually very good for me.
• The sound was okay, but I'm sure it'll be better in the future!

Hopefully the following jams go as well as this one!

Thank you for reading this post-mortem! Here's the link to the game: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/we-pay-in-blood

Social Media:

Twitter GitHub