Into the Breech! Post Mortem for LD 44 By a spastic artist

Hi I'm Dan, I make art, music, and video games. Basically I like to make cool stuff. I'm not a programmer, so apart from the help of my teammates Jordan and DJ all I can do is make cool stuff; I can't make it do anything cool.

This was our 11th Ludum Dare entry that I had fully participated in, but it was the first time I had ever touched anything in 3D. Prior to this we had done 2d platformer, 2d sidescrollers, 2d twin-stick shooters, and even a 2d button masher. This time though, we took on the third dimension.

The journey to LD 44 began about a week prior to the event when Jordan asked me if I wanted to try to do anything with 3D this time around. I said sure, give me a week to learn how to learn some basic modeling and such and we can give it a shot. So we found an easy to use program called "Dust 3D" and I started playing around with it. Unfortunately I found it too klunky for my tastes and decided to ditch the software for one that had frustrated me in the past; Blender 3D. The best thing about Blender is that its free, so it was a natural choice, otherwise I would have gone for Maya something comparable. I may be biased though.

When LD 44 began, we got the theme, collectively groaned as usual (the theme is never what we want, except for one time when it was.) and got to "mindphooning" which you might call brainstorming. We found our idea relatively quickly and then we got to work. We would play as a magical coin that would slowly grow in size as it continued to pick up more and more things. Think Katamari, but with coins. Coinamari if you will. From about the 3rd hour, the problems started to emmerge.

So its not hard to create an object in Blender. Its not hard to import something into Unity for that matter either. It can be a little tricky though when you are trying to output assets from Blender into Unity in a way that your programmer's can use to do things. For instance, you need to be sure that the pivot point for the object is at the 0,0,0 origin point. You need to be sure that the model pieces are all fused into only the pieces that the programmer's need are exported. You need to be sure that the SCALE was set to the proper size (alt+p then u then ctrl+a aka "The cheat code") otherwise scaling the object in Unity will do horrible things, TERRIBLE things (Move it's location instead of just changing size) and since we were working in huge numbers due to the coinamari aspect, we ended up literally losing the assets into the distance aether in the Unity Scene. While it can be fixed, it can more easily just be avoided. Long story short, we had to muddle through a lot of these differences before we could even use the assets that I was making. By the end of the project, most of what I had made I had also exported 2-5 times. As a side note, in Blender the Z axis is the up and down axis, but in Unity its actually the Y axis. I also learned on Monday that shift+k would allow you to autopaint the entire model with a color, ya know, so that you don't have unpainted vertexes on your model that you don't find until hours before the game is to be done.

One of the major things that I learned was the importance of considering the purpose of what I was making and not just what it was. For example, I made a bone that looked great, like a low-poly bone. Problem was it was in no way designed with traversal in mind, and so the ultimate result was a slippery bone that was no fun at all to use when the game was later converted to a platformer due to technical restictions. Just as with music and sfx, you need to think about the context that its being used in prior to just creating an asset that "looks right".

Music and SFX/VO was really simple. I mean, for me its just old hat to write an ingame loop for the game. The real accomplishment for this game was that the music was at the right volume and didn't overpower the player experience. A nice simple theme that sorta floated in the background, creating mood and giving you something to bob your head to without drawing your attention away from the game. The voice over happened out of a need to create a quick cutscene to explain the plot. "Hey Dan, I need you to basically say that the wizard needs money and so he's enchanting his coin, however you want to do that." Sure thing, easy peezy.

One of my vocal lines took FOREVER to record. I probably said "that should do it" 50 times before I got a take that was suitable. "That should do it" became a joke with the team after that.

Finally, I took my first stab at level design to try and help get more of the game area planned out. Turns out level design is difficult. Its really easy to make stuf difficult, but to make things fun for the player experience, there is a certain finess that, like any skill, takes time and practice to develop. If you see the daggers around the potion bottle, that was me at t-10 minutes to push, and I'm sorry for that.

Despite changing our plan halfway through, I think we did pretty well overall. We didn't do everything perfectly, but we managed to deliver a feature complete game that can be beaten (if you have the skillz) and flaws and all, is a good time.

FINAL THOUGHTS

It cannot be stated enough the important of communicating with your team. With everyone engrossed in what they are doing, you can end up stepping on each other's toes or deleting their progress by pushing changes when they are not ready for you to do so. At one point, I deleted all of the game assets in order to reupload them, causing Jordan and DJ to wait on me to get them replaced. There was no reason to do that. It was rather careless and cost us a lot of time.

The best thing about learning that you were doing something wrong is that you get the opportunity to do it correctly afterwards. As they say, always be learning always be failing. I would add always be creating and enjoying what you are doing. That's why I love LD so much, you can just focus on creating something cool with people you enjoy working with and share that with everyone else. As a game designer, I'm a performer and love to entertain.

Thanks for reading!

Daniel