(click me to play the game!)

 

Intro

GitGirl is the game I made for the 48-hour Ludum Dare. It’s a 2D platformer game where you, as GitGirl, must resolve the conflict that plagues the repositories scattered across the galaxy. It doesn’t really make sense, but let’s just go with that!  In order to resolve these conflicts, GitGirl must throw a 5 megaton bomb into the heart of the conflict.  These bombs are designated to explode in 10-seconds and you must escape before that.

About GitGirl

There really isn’t much story behind GitGirl, but there is a sort of history.  She was a character I designed for a game jam hosted by GitHub back in November 2012.  The theme of the jam is anything that relates to Git or GitHub.  The little metal face above her is suppose to mimic OctoCat(tm).  The intergalactic space hair represents pushing and pulling. 😛  Let’s just say the game is pretty loosely based!  This is a significant history for me as it got me to discover Ludum Dare when I was researching about game jams.

 (GitGirl concept art, November 2012)

GitGirl Ludum Dare Edition Postmortem

(Early Work-In-Progress of the Post-Compo, stay tune!)

The Good Times

• Unity 3D – At this point, I have very little problems with Unity3D, in fact, I had no snags working on this game.  I’ve been accumulating a framework I pretty much use for every game development I do with Unity.  This framework is called Mate.  Mate pretty much started since the first Ludum Dare, accumulating useful utilities that I pretty much use a foundation for games I start.  Here’s the repo. Mate has helped me get UI flows, scene management, save states, input done much much quicker than I would if I go with the bare-bones Unity.  I’m pretty happy with it thus far.
• Production – Getting all the UIs, game-flow, and art assets working together was pretty fast during the compo, I pretty much blazed through those.  In fact, I had to…because putting them together was pretty much during the final hours! 😀
• GitGirl – After getting all of the mechanics of the game out of the way (which took a long while), I was pretty much demotivated.  I decided to think about what sort of character this game will have.  I was looking around for inspiration and seeing old sketches of GitGirl, I knew she was going to star in this Ludum Dare!  (mostly because she’s fun to draw)
• Art – Speed drawing was the most fun I had for this entry, even though I still need to work on my art skill 😛  I’m getting more comfortable drawing with a stylus and using Graphics Gale.  But for pixel art, I use mouse pretty much 90% of the time.
• Music – I’m not a musician, so I heavily rely on cgMusic to compose! I was pretty lucky that it was able to produce some decent tunes after just a couple clicks.  All credits to music goes to the author of cgMusic, btw.  Also for those generating music with midi, look for a way to use custom sound fonts if possible, it makes a world of difference! Most noteably SGM v2.01. Solmire comes with this.

The Bad Times

• Late Start – When the theme 10-seconds was announced (6pm PST), I had no idea what kind of game I would make.  I think I pretty much stared blank on the screen and doodled dumb things for an hour or two.  I had two thoughts: Make the obvious run before time runs out or something out of this world.  I pretty much decided on the former 😀
• Complex Mechanic/Level Design – I really wanted to get gravity fields working for this game, it looked pretty awesome as I was testing it.  The problem is, making levels with it.  Also plenty of edge-cases I still need to iron out.  Another issue is trying to implement too many gameplay mechanics.  At some point, I wanted grappling hook for this game…grabbing and throwing enemies/objects…crazy moving platforms.  I ended up with just: jump around, gravity fields, throw/grab bomb.  It wasn’t that bad at all and might be better off just being like this.
• Random Computer Reboot – it was right during level creating when the computer just randomly froze and just reboot.  Considering I had the power on for 2 straight days during a pretty hot weather.  This actually took a good chunk of time and motivation.  First, Windows getting stuck during the start screen…so I have to do a restore from last recovery point (luckily it was fairly recent).  After that, the project was pretty much corrupted.  Luckily I have the project backed up recently from GitHub (considering where this game is inspired from!).  How recent that was however…is no levels and all of the tweaking I made gone.  Could have been worse, so always backup your project in good intervals!

Fun Stuff

 

Characters that didn’t make it into the game…for now!

Designing a level

All sorts of values for tweaking physics!

Timeline editor.  If you guys hate the animation editor in Unity (who doesn’t), this is a great alternative.  It’s a plugin I revived after the author abandoned it.  Here’s the link to its github repo: MateAnimator

The old and the new, they grow up so fast! Or shrink in this case!

Thank you for reading, and don’t forget to give this game a try!   Also stay tune for the post-compo edition of the game with loads of improvements!