{"author_name":"DragonZBW (SparkLight Games)","cat":"LD #36","comments":[{"author_name":"johnasebok","time":"September 1, 2016 10:06 pm","epoch":1472785560,"text":"This is one of the games I was able to play and review.  If your reading this and have not played it &#8211; you need to.","spam":"N"}],"epoch":1472778240,"likes":3,"metadata":{"p_key":"3256","p_author":"DragonZBW (SparkLight Games)","p_authorkey":"85560","p_urlkey":"38723","p_title":"Awakening of the Golem Post Mortem-ey Thing","p_cat":"LD #36","p_event":"LD36","p_time":"1472778240","p_likes":"3","p_comments":"4","p_status":"UPD5","us_key":"85560","us_name":"DragonZBW (SparkLight Games)","us_username":"dragonzbw","event_start":"1472169600","event_key":"35","event_name":"LD36"},"text":"<p>Sooooo&#8230; here&#8217;s this thing I&#8217;m writing I guess. My game is called &#8220;The Awakening of the Golem,&#8221; which sounds super serious, right? It&#8217;s not. Here&#8217;s the link if you wanna check it out:\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/ludumdare.com\/compo\/ludum-dare-36\/?action=preview&amp;uid=85560\" target=\"_blank\">http:\/\/ludumdare.com\/compo\/ludum-dare-36\/?action=preview&amp;uid=85560<\/a><\/p>\n <p>AAAAANYWAY, here&#8217;s my PM on my game, based upon:<\/p>\n <p>The Theme:<\/p>\n <ul>\n <li>I was honestly really disappointed that the theme was Ancient Technology, but I had thought beforehand that that would probably be the theme, so I had time to brainstorm a little bit for the days before LD.<\/li>\n <li>Even though I wasn&#8217;t a fan of the theme this time around, I think I was able to come up with something at least decently good (or at least decently fun, if not good.)<\/li>\n <li>I&#8217;m actually enjoying most of the other people&#8217;s games, which is good. Last time the games were a little less interesting I think but I&#8217;ve found at least a few this time which were really intriguing and fun, although most of the ones I&#8217;ve liked have had a veeeery stretched connection to the theme.<\/li>\n <\/ul>\n <p>The Experience:<\/p>\n <ul>\n <li>This LD was a lot more of a friendly fun experience for me than the last one, since I was in a Skype call with my friend (Corinator, you should check out his game Dungeon Runes, I actually made most of the sound effects for it) pretty much the whole time I was working. It was good to be able to have someone to help me stay sane, and I was able to help him with a lot of the coding as well. We&#8217;ll probably work together next LD (as long as it&#8217;s on a vacation because school is a suck).<\/li>\n <li>My process was also pretty different this time. I did much more animation first than I did last time. In fact, I spent the whole first night and beginning of the next day only working on animation. THEN I got around to making some controls and basic AIs.<\/li>\n <li>I had some major issues, mostly with AI. I&#8217;m not the best when it comes to stuff like that. I tried to make tanks as enemies but ended up going with the red-shirted psychos instead because every which way I tried to get the tank&#8217;s script to work, it would either float aimlessly into the sky, glitch out of control and bounce around the map, or the turret would be rotated wrong EVEN THOUGH I TRIED ROTATION AND LOCALROTATION BLARGH! I actually got pretty down on myself when the tanks didn&#8217;t work since I didn&#8217;t think it would be interesting to just have more humans. I wanted something that took more than one hit to destroy. But I ended up taking the super-non-serious route and just making humans that can kill you with one hit from a knife, kinda as a joke.<\/li>\n <li>The game ended up much more humorous than I originally intended, which is why the intro seems a lot more serious than the game itself. I realized about halfway through that it takes a lot more effort to make a good serious game than a fun silly game, so I went with the latter. I made a serious game last LD anyway, so I feel okay with taking a different path.<\/li>\n <li>I have never made a 3D game with this many Rigidbodies in it before, and let me tell you. My computer is very old and doesn&#8217;t even shut down properly. Sooooo&#8230; It doesn&#8217;t like running games with a lot of physics objects very much. However, it definitely provided a reason for me to learn how to optimize my game, which I did some of (combining meshes was an easy one, increasing the pixel error on the terrain, cutting down on unnecessary Updates and FixedUpdates, etc.).<\/li>\n <\/ul>\n <p>The Feedback:<\/p>\n <ul>\n <li>I felt pretty bad about my game when I first finished it, but a little while after I played it some more and felt pretty proud. I think it&#8217;s not bad for my first real 3D game. Sure, it would&#8217;ve been nice to have harder enemies or better controls, but I&#8217;m still a beginner and you can&#8217;t always have everything you want when you do the Dare.<\/li>\n <li>The feedback so far has been fairly positive. A lot of people have had problems with\u00a0some of the minor control stuff (sliding, stopping when punching, etc). Most of these things are things that were worse when I started making the game, so at least it&#8217;s improved from its original state.<\/li>\n <li>A few people wish that the golem didn&#8217;t die in one hit from fire or knives. I see why, but that was mostly for comedic effect and not because I wanted the game to be super hard or because I didn&#8217;t have time to program health into the game. I suppose it&#8217;s a little unfair, but the game isn&#8217;t that hard. The real problem with the one-hit deaths is that the laser doesn&#8217;t get charged, and that&#8217;s something I could&#8217;ve (and should&#8217;ve) easily fixed. I should&#8217;ve made the laser only take 5 kills to charge instead of 10.<\/li>\n <\/ul>\n <p>SO YEP! THAT&#8217;S ABOUT IT! I&#8217;m pretty satisfied with what I&#8217;ve done. It could&#8217;ve been better but at least I didn&#8217;t have to rush the end of it like I did last time. I&#8217;ll probably do another 2D game next time&#8230; who knows though. 3D is fun, too, it&#8217;s just harder to make levels in a 3D world since you have SO MANY DIRECTIONS the player can go&#8230; But anyway, I&#8217;m not gonna reinstate my satisfaction with this LD any more times. That&#8217;s it, and if you haven&#8217;t played my game yet, I&#8217;d love it if you&#8217;d give it a play (there is an end game, please try and get to it) and give me some more feedback! THIS POST IS SUPER LONG SO I&#8217;M GONNA END IT NOW.<\/p>","time":"September 1st, 2016 8:04 pm","title":"Awakening of the Golem Post Mortem-ey Thing"}