{"author_name":"mjd","cat":"MiniLD","comments":[{"author_name":"","time":"January 16, 2014 7:26 am","epoch":1389875160,"text":"I would recommend using C# and visual studio for unity 3d dev stuff. Very pleasant.","spam":"N"}],"epoch":1389803640,"likes":2,"metadata":{"p_key":"33850","p_author":"mjd","p_authorkey":"0","p_urlkey":"69392","p_title":"Mini LD #48 \u2013 Fawkes Conspiracy retrospective","p_cat":"MiniLD","p_event":"LD28","p_time":"1389803640","p_likes":"2","p_comments":"1","p_status":"UPD5","us_key":null,"us_name":null,"us_username":null,"event_start":"1386892800","event_key":"20","event_name":"LD28"},"text":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.ludumdare.com\/compo\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/01\/progress-4.png\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-329251 aligncenter\" alt=\"progress-4\" src=\"http:\/\/www.ludumdare.com\/compo\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/01\/progress-4-300x182.png\" width=\"300\" height=\"182\" \/><\/a><a href=\"http:\/\/www.ludumdare.com\/compo\/minild-48\/?action=preview&amp;uid=32706\">Entry Page<\/a><\/p>\n <p>So the dust has settled now on Mini LD #48. \u00a0Time for a bit of a retrospective &#8211; in classic Agile Development retrospective style I&#8217;ll group them into things that made me feel &#8220;Mad, Glad and Sad&#8221;.<\/p>\n <h3>Sad<\/h3>\n <ul>\n <li>I wanted to have the police &#8220;chase&#8221; you after spotting you, and have the King (and by-standers) try and make an escape if he felt threatened. \u00a0All of this is fairly &#8220;basic&#8221; state space search based AI, but I just didn&#8217;t have the time or experience with Unity (e.g. how to represent the state-graph with unity&#8217;s game objects could be an interesting challenge) to make this happen.<\/li>\n <li>I wanted more depth in the game world &#8211; I loved the chairs and tables etc getting scattered around, if I had more time I would have added more props and fun things to &#8220;play&#8221; with.<\/li>\n <li>I wanted decent sounds and music but didn&#8217;t have the time or skill to do this. \u00a0If I enter again I think I will bend the rules and try to find some public domain audio and use that instead.<\/li>\n <li>It was too dark and general dreary, and making the textures was a pain when sticking to the rules of not pre-creating or just taking other&#8217;s textures.<\/li>\n <li>I wanted to have more finesse in the buildings &#8211; smaller cubes that perhaps broke into smaller ones etc.<\/li>\n <li>No explosion effects!<\/li>\n <\/ul>\n <h3>Mad<\/h3>\n <ul>\n <li>Police placement was obviously not very well spaced and needed work as they often clumped.<\/li>\n <li>There was a bug in the top-left of the map where one of the supposed-to-be-invisible spawn areas was visible. \u00a0Argh!<\/li>\n <li>Not much re-playability. \u00a0I had initially wanted to have several levels but despite having fun laying out the one level, \u00a0I didn&#8217;t have the time to do multiple levels and I struggled with manageability of Unity&#8217;s game hierarchy as it quickly became unwieldy without a proper map editor and loading system.<\/li>\n <li>Unity&#8217;s script editor is seriously deficient (at least for javascript):\n <ul>\n <li>Very slow to open, sometimes it also stopped letting me display a tab without using keyboard shortcuts or menus.<\/li>\n <li>Watch statements &amp; local variables during debugging were unreliable &#8211; sometimes they were not displayed which makes debugging incredibly inefficient.<\/li>\n <li>Auto-complete only seemed to work about 25% of the time, and then when it did it often had the incorrect suggestions (basically every time I correctly typed &#8220;transform&#8221; (a class local) it changed it to &#8220;Transform&#8221; (type name) for example) and <strong>never<\/strong> did it have sensible suggestions for objects I had declared in my code, despite using the type declarations.<\/li>\n <li>Finally it didn&#8217;t even highlight syntax errors so if you&#8217;d accidentally forget a semi-colon or something there was no warning in the editor, it was only when you get back to Unity itself that it tells you. \u00a0Crazy &#8211; there has to be a better way (anyone done an Eclipse plugin for Unity?)<\/li>\n <\/ul>\n <\/li>\n <\/ul>\n <h3>Glad<\/h3>\n <ul>\n <li>On the whole, I quite enjoyed it. \u00a0I got a kick out of blowing up the rooms with stuff in them and seeing the tables fly around the room.<\/li>\n <li>It was vaguely playable considering I had way under 48 hours worth of time to dedicate to this.<\/li>\n <li>Glad I didn&#8217;t do another side-scrolling indie platformer!<\/li>\n <\/ul>\n <p>Oh and before I sign off, an interesting little bit of stats for you: \u00a0I used the goo.gl URL shortener to provide links to the different platforms (web, windows, linux, osx) which gives you some basic stats on how many times the link was used. \u00a0After about a week I found the following statistics on platform usage.<\/p>\n <ul>\n <li>Web (Unity webplayer): 87%<\/li>\n <li>Windows download: 10%<\/li>\n <li>Linux download: 3%<\/li>\n <li>OSX download: zero &#8211; not a single click<\/li>\n <\/ul>\n <p>So I shant bother with OSX next time then! haha! (obligatory disclosure: I use linux &amp; OSX at work, windows at home and I HATE using OSX compared to both linux &amp; windows)<\/p>\n <p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n <p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n <p>&nbsp;<\/p>","time":"January 15th, 2014 11:34 am","title":"Mini LD #48 \u2013 Fawkes Conspiracy retrospective"}