Tokyo Station

Mini-post-mortem

I tried doing something a little different for this Ludum Dare – I spent the first few hours putting together the soundtrack, then tried to build a game around it. I thought I’d post up a soundcloud link to the original soundtrack:

http://snd.sc/14fnJBr

(Can’t seem to get the soundcloud widget to work )

The good

I’m pretty happy with how the music turned out.  After a few youtube tutorials, I’m starting to get my head around the FL Studio interface, and there’s a huge range of instruments and effects to play around with.

The visual side of the game just came about through experimenting in Unity. I set up some walls moving towards you that you needed to avoid, which was nice enough, but giving them all rotation speed just gave the whole thing this mesmerising, tumbling sensation, which I loved. The epic background countdown came from my hatred of blurry 2D Toolkit fonts

I was also able to get the game up on Kongregate, so that people can compete for high scores (although the actual recording of scores doesn’t seem to work that reliably for some reason). I haven’t been able to work out whether Kongregate have some sort of dev environment where you can test things like submitting scores, if anyone has any idea, please let me know!

Naming my games is also a lot easier now that I delegate that decision to wikipedia’s random article…

The bad

Controls are always the part of game dev that I find hardest, and Tokyo Station was no exception. There are a few problems with the current controls, and I have a few ideas on how to possibly resolve them in the future:

• Its hard to estimate the distance between you and oncoming targets, and the perspective of the camera, which makes it hard to tell if you are going to collide with an object. I’m thinking it might be possible to resolve this by having some sort of laser-targeting line emitting forwards from the player. I don’t want to change the perspective of the camera, as that would kill of the sensation of falling, but the chromatic aberration effect should probably be toned down a bit at the edges.
• The controls feel a bit floaty and imprecise. I think this is because there isn’t a 1:1 relationship between your mouse position and your player position. I might be able to get around this by just hiding the cursor.
• Some of the powerups get spawned right at the edge of screen and are impossible (or very difficult) to collect. This is a bit of a symptom of how quickly the game was made (the original version was created on the Monday, for the jam). There is no fixed “play area”, the player can move around in a certain zone (which is probably slightly too large) and the walls and powerups spawn in a roughly overlapping zone. I just need to lock everything to the same play area.

Now its time for me to put the game to one side for a while and rate more games! 😀