Hello everyone! In this post i want to talk about my experiences on Ludum Dare #32: An Unconventional Weapon. First of all i am new to this Game Jam things and have a little bit Unity3D experience. By experience i mean i have made a succesful Doodle Jump clone a year ago. My only big hope source was my huge knowledge of C++. I have learned so many stuff while Compo and after it so ill talk about them in time order. Here goes the story of Bird Quest!

Before the Ludum Dare

I was just looking around. Checking twitch chat and other stuff. My fault was not having a look on old ludum games. Like what people does for menus and stuff.

An Unconventional Weapon

Well, what a theme! It’s just too relax! You can do anything! Well, no. After 1 and half hours i had 3 different ideas.

1) Light as a Weapon

You guys know Alan Wake right. Think it in 2d platformer style. You have a flashlight and dark creatures haunting you. This idea was not possible because i dont have enough knowledge about collision detections. How can you check if flashlights light is colliding with enemy or not?

2) Money as a Weapon

This one was fun to think. You are a rich man. Very rich and greedy! An angel comes down to earth to punish you. Your punishment is you can only use money as a weapon! And people you have hurt before are attacking you. Gameplay is simply gun upgrading. Imagine a gatling gun made of dollars firing quarters! Too many pixel art and illogical backstory made me give up on this one.

3) An animal as a Weapon

Robot Wants Puppy is a game that fits too well into the this theme. Check it out.

When i remembered this game i decided i could make something with a bird instead of cat.

So my journey began!

How to Find a Path!

After implementing the bird. Throw and call back stuff. (You’ll see what i mean here) I made a simple enemy for testing birds attack. My first plan was enemies being guards as you are kidnapped by pirates or something. So if someone notices you he will chase you. For that i needed a pathfinding system. Unity only have pathfinding for 3D. But you can always use 3d things for 2d games right! NOPE! In order to use Unity’s built-in navmesh thingy things must be on X-Z plane. Not unlike Unity’s built-in 2d stuff which uses X-Y plane. So i was going to either flip everything and spend more time on future things because i will be using 3d colliders for a 2d game etc. or find another pathfinding system. (Incoming bad pun) On internet i learned that i need “a star”. But i havent used asset store before. And never going to pay for a algorithm. Also i am 17 years old now so it doesn’t make sense spending my dad’s money into something i may end up not using. So i placed a post here. Thanks to community my blog got a help comment. About a free A* package. Haven’t tried it though. I decided to stop spending time on this pathfinding subject and make my enemies just walk to player foolishly when they see the player.

Bird is flying

This is the only thing i have recorded while compo and i feel really bad about it now. I will probably just record some dev progress on next ones. Anyway as you see bird can fly, stop, kill enemy. There is no animation just simple sprites. It was my first time doing a grid sprite sheet and more importantly it was my first time using the animations in unity for animating a walking 2D sprites. I worked out better then i thought. But my art skills were worse then i hoped B(.

Last Hours

On last 4 or 5 hours i had no gameplay. Just enemies and the player with her bird. And no menu. That things done in a hurry. I used GUI buttons in Unity for first time. Made a shitty menu. Added a last minute second map. And i was ready to build.

You can’t build for WebGL on 32 bit

Apperantly B(. I still have this problem if someone could make a WebGL build for me it would be too awesome! Please, please leave a comment if you can help me with that! So i only made a Windows build. By the way end of submission hour was 5 am here. So after i uploaded stuff and took a shower so i could stay awake for a school day and leaved home.

 

Power of Community

Really, this place has a strong community. Thanks to everbody that helped me on any part of this thing!

I tried to play some of other peoples games on my linux computer at school. (Long story short we study for local informatics olympiads at school so i have a personal computer there) It just feels so good when some people just plays and comments to your game B).

There was no audio in my game. Because i really really have no idea how someone can make music. And time was limited so i didnt add any sound into Bird Quest. But ill learn about this stuff and add a music on my next projects. Even the music will be just 10-15 notes looping.

Bird Quest Compo Page

I did some minor changes on some sprites, added a tutorial and 2 new maps etc, and made a Post-Compo build. And also Linux and Mac builds. These arent tested i just clicked build here so please tell me if they work or not. I need to make a WebGL build my pc just can’t do it. Please someone help me with that. All i want is someone building my source and and giving me the build. Also i am planning to make a post about the nice entries i have found in a week. I don’t know maybe even some playtrough videos for them. So stay tuned! (Wow i did a post. It feels good.)