Hello! I am a 14 year old game developer and I am going to try to portray my process in making my LD32 game. And no, the post is not named after the theme. Sometimes my strangest ideas end up being my best ideas.

Let me rephrase that. My strangest ideas are always my best ideas.

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-32/?action=preview&uid=46961

The evening I heard that the theme was “an unconventional weapon, ” I must admit my first thought was a baguette sword. I don’t know why. I did not in fact make that, but I have seen somebody’s game who did. Anyway, I sat down and thought for a while, what could be an interesting play on the theme? I could just make a game with a baguette sword, or something like that, but that has never been how I end up interpreting seemingly self explanatory instructions. I prefer to find, if you like, a loophole—something I can guarantee is original and makes you wonder if it really fits the theme. And since the theme is a few words, hardly a legal document, this is usually a fun challenge that lasts, oh, a minute or so.

So Unconvention was born!

What better way to interpret the word unconventional than the unconventioning of conventions?

Comic-Con? Kaboom.

I had a rough idea of what I wanted to do. Aerial view, conventions down on the ground below, maybe they could get bigger or stronger. Then I thought a bit about the weapons you could use to destroy the conventions. In my loophole, it didn’t really matter at all what the weapons were, as long they were a weapon that un-conventioned conventions. An Unconventional weapon.

Then I went to sleep, or tried to. Ideas were flowing through my head at a rapid pace and it was all I could do not to jump onto the design right away.

The next morning, Sunday, I couldn’t actually start work yet. I had been working on a modeling project for school that I needed to get done as soon as possible, and so rushed through some final retopology and called it a day

(this project can be seen at https://cgcookie.com/blender/images/friendly-robot/).

Then I cracked down on my game design.

I started out be designing my landscape. Using blender I quickly outlined a vast expanse of terrain using the ANT landscape generator. Then I decimated it for a low poly look and added a few quirks like highlands and larger bodies of water by pulling large bits up and down. I also pulled the edges down and got a cool coastline that was roughly in a square but in-game it would appear very natural. I applied a gradient texture with grass, sand, rock, etc. by UV unwrapping the mesh from a side view. This ended up looking amazing, so I put a halt on the landscape construction and moved on to some basic controls in Unity.

I fear I spent way too many hours on the controls, feeling alright because of the fantastic view of the landscape below me (now with a water plane). I made controls where there was an open spot in the middle of the screen where the cursor was free to move (cursor replaced with a crosshair) and if it went outside this safe area the space station would move in that direction. It was based on the idea that the player would be using the laser inside the safe zone mainly but occasionally moving it towards the edge and in that case the screen should move to accommodate it. Great and done.

next I actually planned out the game in the sense that I made a progression of screens on paper so I knew what to make in what order. My dad and I planned out what gameplay features I should make, and in what order, so I wouldn’t get caught up on something of low importance. Then I got to it.

Now, I quickly decided a few things. One was that you were in a space station, one that could quickly navigate to be directly over any point on the globe. The space station would be the weapon itself, armed in a few different ways but all focused on the one task. The weapons I chose to be on the space station were bombs and a laser.

I first created the bombs. They were a simple model, one that took maybe two minutes at the most. The dropping of them was equally easy, though I threw in the effect that you were much higher up than you really were (about three times the height of the mountains) by making the bomb shrink as it fell. This created a fun illusion of falling a good bit farther than they really did. These working, I moved on.

Bombs in action:

Laser was next, this was very simple as well. I just made a screenpointtoraycast based on the crosshair coordinates. Then a line renderer did the work of rendering a laser beam that also shrunk at the bottom to add illusion of height. A little particle system with a ball collider and point light followed the end of the ray, and this collider, having a “laser” tag, could be detected by anything I wanted to be zapped.

More to come in Part 2!