Play and rate

tl;dr

What went right
Graphics – I love the brain!
Cut scenes – I think they’re funny!
Gameplay – Controls and such work and feel pretty much how I wanted them

What went wrong
Levels – Too many levels for 48 hours!
Music – Not my forte.
Bugs – I had too much content that I was generating too fast.

Lessons learned
Don’t nest too many actions in C#
I can build a fully featured and relatively large game in 48 hours
I suck at music

Well, my first Ludum Dare is done, and it was awesome! I’ve done game jams in the past but LD is a whole other ball of wax. This time out I decided to be ambitious, insanely, stupidly ambitious!

The theme came as a surprise to me. I had planned for lots of them but “You are the monster” slipped through the cracks. Fortunately, a few months ago I had come up with the idea of a “space invaders in reverse” game. The only problem was, my concept was for a full scale game with cutscenes, hand crafted levels, and full 3d! Way too ambitious for me to do all by myself in 48 hours!

Well, never let it be said I lacked for ambition! It turned out to not be that tough. I started with the 3D modeling. I used Qubicle, (the 3d designer that cross road used), I wanted to use a limited Atari style palette so I used 8 total colors. I’ve been using Qubicle for a while and like it. My approach was to draw a “sprite” first in 2D. Then extrude into 3D and then carve out details. I’m super happy with how my models came out, especially Emperor Brain. He is my favorite character I have ever designed!

I also needed 3d text. I used Cheetah3D which is kind of a leaner, cheaper, Maya. I like it better than Blender because Blender has a UI designed for people from some planet that has more arms and fingers than Humans do! Anyway, creating 3D text in Cheetah was really easy.

Finally, I could move onto code. I’m genuinely happy with all the code I wrote on Saturday. I built all my classes as state machines. My idea was that if I took the extra time to structure everything correctly at the start then I would be able to greatly simplify the “crisis code” I knew I would be writing on Sunday. That was the best decision I made during the jam!

So, in addition to all this I also needed to script and voice cut scenes. I know I’m insane! The scripting was really easy. I’ll be the first to admit it could be tightened up. But for something that was more or less a stream of consciousness, not too bad. The script itself took me about an hour. Recording dialog took another hour. I used Audacity because it is the only recording software I have a clue about! For the actual recording I used the Blue Yeti microphone. I’m pretty sure I used the wrong settings on the mic and I forgot to use the spit guard (my wife knows about recording audio, not me, so I was SOL). If I had set myself up like I normally would for recording it would have sounded a lot better!

One thing I wanted to do was edit the audio files to make the whole thing tighter, but I didn’t have nearly enough time for that! I also didn’t have time to rerecord for anything other than serious issues and flubbed lines.

Another thing I needed more time on was level design. For some reason I decided I needed 9 levels. There was no way for me to make 9 hand crafted exquisite levels. This was a huge mistake. I wish I had focused on making 4 perfect levels rather than 9 decent ones. Live and learn!

One really interesting thing I learned about Mono is that if you have too many nested actions it will freak out, use 100% of the CPU and hang. I’m not sure why this happens. But it didn’t make for a fun Sunday surprise! I ended up needing to remove the ability to skip individual lines of dialog. This little surprise took a couple of hours to fix. It was the only major technical hiccough.

Generally though, I’m super happy with how everything came out I definitely plan on being back for LD34!

No really, play and rate

P.S. I screen caped all the cut scenes in case anyone is interested in the entire ludicrous story!