Hey guys, so I thought I could do a little wrap up of my Compo entry called Chicken Luck. It was my fifth Ludum Dare game and since game coding is my job for several years now, I thought I'm adequately prepared for the challenge.

Graphics: I do have small graphic design background but it was some time since I created any 3D model or graphics of any sort so I at least tried some things in Blender before game jam started to not struggle with most simple tasks. I must say I was very happy how Blender evolved in time and user experience was actually quite good. I've used single file for all models relying heavily on collections. Export to Unity was without issues. I even had some time to do some rigging and animations. This was most surprising to me as my previous experience with rigging was some poor human autorig few years back. But guess what? It's not that complicated and with Blender's Auto IK feature it is actually possibile to get useful results with just very simple rig.

Coding: This was my first entry where I didn't use any custom code base on top of standard Unity libraries. Oh boy, what a freedom! No unnecessary UI codes, game managers, loaders, tweeners and what not. Just a blank page and the sensation to start from ground up.

Design: I feel like I still have much to learn in regards of design. First I wanted to have a lot of physics environment interactions which would make the game more interesting and easy to make. For example some animated blocks could push chicken to empty space. Oh boy, what was I thinking? I literally killed several hours trying to figure out how to combine physics interactions with player controls. After I got something finally working I realized that result is not smooth so I threw it all and redesigned the game to current state.

Sound: I think this is my weakest point now. Although I borrowed a recording device from my friend and I'm quite happy with sound effects, I was not able to add any music. I do not have the skill needed to put together something ear-pleasing in like two hours. That is definitely something I would like to work on in the future.

Overall it was again a great learning experience and motivation for future development. I love Ludum Dare!

P.S.: I would be very happy if you have time to play and rate my game:

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/chicken-luck