Alien’s Curse

I started by writing and doodling ideas in my notebook.

After getting general idea of gameplay I began constructing muenu panels, characters and items using my already existing scripts.
Few adjustments and fixes and my gameplay prototype was ready. It didn’t differ much from the final game:
Platformer with mouse aiming focused on fighting with AI.

Day Two:

First I needed to choose game’s style. Quickly I realized that I can’t make decent looking hand drawn sprites in that short time.
I couldn’t make vector graphics matching ancient theme, so I decided to use pixel art.
My first idea was to draw ancient Greek architecture and sculptures as enemies.
It looked pretty nice but I couldn’t find natural sky color contrasting with it
(I must start making colored doodles, my color picking skills still aren’t dependable enough.)

I decided to switch to drawing characters, drawing and animating player sprite was much easier than doing tileset.
I looked through my notes and found good fable idea for pyramid expedition game.
After searching for reference images I started doing tiles again, this time it turned out good enough.
I drew few details and tile varitaions and went to sleep.

Day Three:

Drawing the mummy wasn’t very difficult, although I spent some time on research of slow walking animation.
I spent next few hours on polishing sprites and modifying scripts.
Then I started recording sounds (I put a thick coverlet on a small table and recorded under it).
I practiced making music the day before jam, so I didn’t struggle with it as much as in previous jams.
After having all assets done (about 9pm) I started making maps using my unity custom editor.
And then I realized I didn’t test game on target (WebGL) platform.
You know, what’s coming: bugs. Two hours left and two game breaking bugs to fix, it gave me a lot of stress.
Fortunally one of them happened in my previous game, so I only needed to check few files.
Second was my syntax error: I wrote (value<-0) in my health script.
It worked in the editor, but as you probably know some crazy stuff happens when you build Unity3D projects, so it didn’t pass.
I published my game half hour before jam deadline with feeling of relief.
The game turned out better than I excepted and I got a lot of ideas for tools, games and things to practice.

Tools I used:
-Unity3D
-Gimp
-Piskel
-Audacity
-Bosca Ceoil
-GifCam

What went wrong:

-I wasted too much time on graphics
-I started doing levels too late

What went well:

-Adding tutorial makes big difference, I didn’t get any comments like: “X didn’t work”, “I didn’t know what to do”
-Fable wasn’t as bad as I expected

Key Takeaways

-Instead of chaotic testing of different kinds of graphics I should put all possibilities as soon as possible and choose the best one in first two hours
-I should work on levels from the beggining and make them easy to update after adding new content and changing scripts
-The game has only three levels and tutorial and still nobody is complaining about it’s length;
I think that one of the challenges of making game for LD is showing as many game features as possible in shortest gameplay time, since most of people spend only few minutes on playing each game.

It is probably the longest text I’ve ever written in English.
Sorry for my bad writing skills and thanks for reading.

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