{"author_name":"DustyStylus","cat":"LD #28","comments":[{"author_name":"","time":"December 17, 2013 6:21 am","epoch":1387279260,"text":"Considering the scope of the idea you did amazingly well in the short period of time given. And you contributed a cool and unique game!","spam":"N"},{"author_name":"DustyStylus","time":"December 17, 2013 11:10 am","epoch":1387296600,"text":"Thanks Gravedrinker! Loved your thrust game, one of my high rates games! Tricky and addictive!","spam":"N"},{"author_name":"DustyStylus","time":"December 17, 2013 11:11 am","epoch":1387296660,"text":"Rates = Rated","spam":"N"}],"epoch":1387273080,"likes":1,"metadata":{"p_key":"34355","p_author":"DustyStylus","p_authorkey":"15902","p_urlkey":"69902","p_title":"A very porky post mortem.","p_cat":"LD #28","p_event":"LD28","p_time":"1387273080","p_likes":"1","p_comments":"3","p_status":"UPD5","us_key":"15902","us_name":"DustyStylus","us_username":"dustystylus","event_start":"1386892800","event_key":"20","event_name":"LD28"},"text":"<p>After waking up to read the topic I went back to bed and thought about a few ideas in the small hours. &#8220;You only get one&#8221; &#8211; for some reason made me think of &#8220;24&#8221; or these cop shows where they have to get their man (or woman) in a certain time frame. There was an old ST game called &#8220;The Killing Cloud&#8221; by Konami that had a cool interrogation scene and I wanted to do something similar. So I borrowed another idea from an old (1988!!) ST game called Captain Blood which had a crude language interpreter.<\/p>\n <p><strong>What Went Right<\/strong><\/p>\n <p>It&#8217;s no secret that I particularly love doing silly sound FX and writing Music most of all for LD&#8230; which gets me thinking that maybe next time I&#8217;ll join a JAM group simply to do the music and FX.\u00a0<span style=\"line-height: 1.5em\">I&#8217;d decided to go for a Monty Python-esque graphic style and I&#8217;m actually quite pleased with how it turned out. I think I work faster this way than with pixel art, which I&#8217;m not very good at. (some of you people are mind-bogglingly good!)<\/span><\/p>\n <p>I wanted a Python-meets-70s-UK-cop-show-The-Sweeney with plenty of silly phrases, (aka SHUT IT YOU SLAAAAG).<\/p>\n <p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.ludumdare.com\/compo\/2013\/12\/17\/a-very-porky-post-mortem\/pm3-2\/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-322403\"><img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-322403\" alt=\"pm3\" src=\"http:\/\/www.ludumdare.com\/compo\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/12\/pm3.jpg\" width=\"320\" height=\"255\" srcset=\"http:\/\/ludumdare.com\/compo\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/12\/pm3-300x239.jpg 300w, http:\/\/ludumdare.com\/compo\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/12\/pm3.jpg 320w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 320px) 100vw, 320px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n <p><strong>What Went Wrong<\/strong><\/p>\n <p><strong>1. Don&#8217;t bite off more than you can chew<\/strong><\/p>\n <p>Implementing a language interpreter like Captain Blood turned out to be much more work than I anticipated! By the time I&#8217;d actually got it functional, I still needed to write the actual dialogs and knowledge for the suspects. There were originally meant to be 3 suspects and towards the deadline I was lucky to get the 2 finished! Sadly, the hints system conflicted with the actual results being said back to you which confused things rather than helping. I took out several words to make the game easier. There&#8217;s a ton of words that never got used! ;____; Also, I should&#8217;ve used 2 rows of icons like Captain Blood rather than the huge scroll-fest.<\/p>\n <div id=\"attachment_322407\" style=\"width: 330px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.ludumdare.com\/compo\/2013\/12\/17\/a-very-porky-post-mortem\/captainblood\/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-322407\"><img class=\"size-full wp-image-322407\" alt=\"captainblood\" src=\"http:\/\/www.ludumdare.com\/compo\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/12\/captainblood.png\" width=\"320\" height=\"200\" srcset=\"http:\/\/ludumdare.com\/compo\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/12\/captainblood-300x187.png 300w, http:\/\/ludumdare.com\/compo\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/12\/captainblood.png 320w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 320px) 100vw, 320px\" \/><\/a><p class=\"wp-caption-text\">Captain Blood 1988 Language Interpreter<\/p><\/div>\n <div id=\"attachment_322408\" style=\"width: 330px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.ludumdare.com\/compo\/2013\/12\/17\/a-very-porky-post-mortem\/pm2-2\/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-322408\"><img class=\"size-full wp-image-322408\" alt=\"pm2\" src=\"http:\/\/www.ludumdare.com\/compo\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/12\/pm2.jpg\" width=\"320\" height=\"190\" srcset=\"http:\/\/ludumdare.com\/compo\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/12\/pm2-300x178.jpg 300w, http:\/\/ludumdare.com\/compo\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/12\/pm2.jpg 320w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 320px) 100vw, 320px\" \/><\/a><p class=\"wp-caption-text\">LD 28 Language Interpreter<\/p><\/div>\n <p><strong>\u00a02.\u00a0Beware of Global Variables<\/strong><\/p>\n <p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.ludumdare.com\/compo\/2013\/12\/17\/a-very-porky-post-mortem\/scream\/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-322414\"><img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-322414\" alt=\"scream\" src=\"http:\/\/www.ludumdare.com\/compo\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/12\/scream.jpg\" width=\"226\" height=\"282\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n <p>Horrible errors started appearing and the laguage interpreter wouldn&#8217;t appear properly&#8230; but only when restarting or loading a new level. D: I hunted for hours to find the problem&#8230; turns out it was in a Global Static class where data was being loaded into a Dictionary that was constantly held in game memory&#8230; but wasn&#8217;t being wiped between levels. Don&#8217;t be led to believe that Application.LoadLevel(&#8230;) will magically reset everything! These classes persist&#8230; and there was no good reason to make it global in the first place!<\/p>\n <p><strong>3. Use the Right Tool for the Right Job<\/strong><\/p>\n <p>You&#8217;d think for a 2D game I would&#8217;ve used Unity&#8217;s new Sprite system? Nope, I couldn&#8217;t be bothered reading up on it, so the character is actually implemented as a skeleton with textures attached to quads in the skeleton heirarchy!<\/p>\n <p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.ludumdare.com\/compo\/2013\/12\/17\/a-very-porky-post-mortem\/pm1-2\/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-322416\"><img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-322416\" alt=\"pm1\" src=\"http:\/\/www.ludumdare.com\/compo\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/12\/pm1.jpg\" width=\"320\" height=\"287\" srcset=\"http:\/\/ludumdare.com\/compo\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/12\/pm1-300x269.jpg 300w, http:\/\/ludumdare.com\/compo\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/12\/pm1.jpg 320w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 320px) 100vw, 320px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n <p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n <p>On the Saturday I got round to watching a video tutorial on the new Unity Sprite system&#8230; and WOW&#8230; it would have solved so many issues from the start. As usual, the Unity documentation is a little bit sparse, but the power in there is incredible. The &#8220;intro&#8221; to the game is done using the sprite system once I&#8217;d figured out how it worked.<\/p>\n <p>You can play the game here: <a title=\"WHO ATE ALL THE PIES???\" href=\"http:\/\/www.ludumdare.com\/compo\/ludum-dare-28\/?action=preview&amp;uid=15902\"><strong>WHO ATE ALL THE PIES ???<\/strong><\/a><\/p>","time":"December 17th, 2013 4:38 am","title":"A very porky post mortem."}