Inspiration can come from the most unlikely places!

So there I was on Friday night, watching some YouTube videos on Unity while I was waiting in the IRC Channel for the theme to be announced. I had my list of game ideas up and had gone over them several time making sure I was happy with each of the ideas I had thought of for the different themes in the final round. ‘You Are The Monster’ only had one idea next to it, sadly I wasn’t really happy with it but it was one theme out of 20 and only had a 5% chance of winning… or so I thought :). 9 O’clock pm EDT rolls around and the theme is announced.

My heart sank… ‘You Are The Monster’ wins the final round. I looked at my idea again, still not happy with it. So I begin to brainstorm again for the next hour and I come up with something. To be honest I’m not really sure why I think of anything for this theme as it can be interpreted in many ways. I should of had a hundred ideas for this theme! But I didn’t… With the idea I did have I started in on making some art for it, and I come up with a few different designs.

I played around in Photoshop making some animations, brought the sprites into Unity and played around with the sizing of them. Then something weird happened… I lost all motivation to continue with this idea of mine… in fact I hated the idea… and I was back at square one… sigh… it was just about 2AM now… I gave up and went to bed.

Woke up before 9AM, still didn’t have a game idea yet. I make myself some breakfast, walk the dogs and basically just mill around the house. Around 10:30-ish I decided to see how everyone else is fairing on the LD website. I scrolled through the different posts and then I came upon a pic in one post. I stared at it for a few minutes and just like that I had my game idea! I again went back to Photoshop and mocked up some art, created my project in Unity and began the long journey of turning my idea into a game.

Now on to the Post-Mortem…

What Went Right
Let’s start off with some good news shall we :).

1. The Art – Not being an artist by any stretch of the imagination I was still really happy with the art I created. I am especially proud of the gold coins I made.
2. The Idea – Once I knew what I wanted to do I was able to easily flesh it out quickly.
3. Experience with Unity – This hindered me a little last LD, but this time around I was much more confidant.
4. Not a lot of bugs – This was a blessing It also helped me focus on getting the game complete instead of having to go back and fix things too much
5. Effective Time Management – A great skill to have for a Game Jam!

What Went Wrong

1. Collisions, Collisions, Collisions – Yep, I had problems with them again! Seem I was not aware a BoxCollider2D has a top and a bottom. This caused me about 20 minutes of frustration :).
2. The spawning of the enemies – While the spawning works, I do think I could have made it better than what was implemented
3. More player abilities – This of course comes from hindsight, but I’m thinking I should have added another ability than just shooting. like a breath bar that gives you the ability to breath fire that covers a small radius in front of you. Once the bar was depleted it would take like 30-45 seconds to recharge.
4. Knight’s Sounds – I’m not sure why but coding the sound so you could hear the knights death cries too longer than expected. I think it had something to do with a change that was made in the way Unity 5 handles prefabs. I could be wrong :/

If you’d like to Play and Rate my game, you can find it here. See you all in December for LD 34!