Conception

It was my first time using Unity in a LD, so I thought I might as well try something bigger than I normally do. So I chose a FPS since I had never made one before. First (obvious) idea that came to mind was limiting the ammo to a single bullet, but the thought of getting back that bullet is weird. Then I thought of using a bow as a weapon, so that getting the single arrow back would be understandable. I kept that idea until the end of the first day, when I decided to make the game funnier: the gun was back and its single bullet too. What happens when it’s fired? The obvious: you start throwing your gun at stuff. There were also little robots as enemies before, scrapped that in favor of devilishly cute floating targets. I find quotes that appear when you die very annoying, so I had to put them in my first FPS of course.

Difficulties

The outlined walls were a pain. The default Unity Toon shaders did not work properly and every single outline shader I found had annoying problems. In the end I managed to adjust one to my needs and, thankfully, it fit nicely. Unity collision system was also a pain. The gun kept going through walls even with continous collision enabled (???). Fixed that by making the static colliders really really thick, horribly hacky. Fun fact: There are no floor or ceiling meshes in the game, it’s just the viewport clear color. Music had its frustrations as well. I tried Terry’s Bosca Ceoil first but couldn’t compose anything good. The final, almost silent, bgm is from Autotracker.

Conclusion

Unity is great for making games quickly as long as they’re simple and, most importantly, as long as you know its flaws (and they’re many). I’m proud of the result, my most fun LD game so far. Still lots of polishing to do though. You can play my game, Lovely Bullets, here.

Tags: animated gif, post-mortem, Unity 3D