{"author_name":"JonathanG","cat":"LD #26","comments":[],"epoch":1367596740,"likes":2,"metadata":{"p_key":"42774","p_author":"JonathanG","p_authorkey":"11515","p_urlkey":"78409","p_title":"\u274f\u2665\u2740 post-mortem","p_cat":"LD #26","p_event":"LD26","p_time":"1367596740","p_likes":"2","p_comments":"0","p_status":"UPD5","us_key":"11515","us_name":"JonathanG","us_username":"jonathang","event_start":"1366934400","event_key":"16","event_name":"LD26"},"text":"<p>This is our third time entering Ludum Dare!\u00a0 Our previous games were <a href=\"http:\/\/www.govergames.co.uk\/macro-marines\" target=\"_blank\">Macro Marines<\/a>\u00a0in LD23 and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.govergames.co.uk\/mighty-chondria\" target=\"_blank\">Mighty-chondria<\/a> in LD24.\u00a0 We didn\u2019t manage to enter LD25, but for LD26 we\u2019ve made another great game!<\/p>\n <div id=\"attachment_255496\" style=\"width: 560px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.govergames.co.uk\/\"><img class=\"size-full wp-image-255496\" alt=\"You may remember us from previous games such as...\" src=\"http:\/\/www.ludumdare.com\/compo\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/05\/previous-games.png\" width=\"550\" height=\"168\" \/><\/a><p class=\"wp-caption-text\">You may remember us from previous games such as&#8230;<\/p><\/div>\n <p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n <hr \/>\n <p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n <h2>A post-mortem of\u00a0\u274f\u2665\u2740 (<a href=\"http:\/\/www.ludumdare.com\/compo\/ludum-dare-26\/?action=preview&amp;uid=11515\" target=\"_blank\">Square Heart Flower<\/a>)<\/h2>\n <p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n <p style=\"text-align: center\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.ludumdare.com\/compo\/ludum-dare-26\/?action=preview&amp;uid=11515\"><img class=\"aligncenter size-large wp-image-255499\" alt=\"ld26-screenshot-1\" src=\"http:\/\/www.ludumdare.com\/compo\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/05\/ld26-screenshot-1-550x343.png\" width=\"550\" height=\"343\" srcset=\"http:\/\/ludumdare.com\/compo\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/05\/ld26-screenshot-1-300x187.png 300w, http:\/\/ludumdare.com\/compo\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/05\/ld26-screenshot-1-550x343.png 550w, http:\/\/ludumdare.com\/compo\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/05\/ld26-screenshot-1.png 960w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 550px) 100vw, 550px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n <p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n <p>Please do\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.ludumdare.com\/compo\/ludum-dare-26\/?action=preview&amp;uid=11515\" target=\"_blank\">play our game and give it a rating!<\/a><\/p>\n <p>Here&#8217;s a timelapse of us making it:<\/p>\n <p><iframe width=\"500\" height=\"281\" src=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/DSH3j1bFK8Y?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n <h3><span style=\"font-size: 1.17em\">Good<\/span><\/h3>\n <p><b>Unity is brilliant, and easy to use!<\/b>\u00a0 We\u2019ve used it for a couple of games, and although we could still improve the way we organise our code\/prefabs\/scenes, it lets us put a game together very quickly!\u00a0 It\u2019s also robust enough that we don\u2019t have to worry about crashes or rendering problems.<\/p>\n <p><b>Minimalism made the art easier to create!<\/b>\u00a0 It would be easy to think that a minimalistic theme would allow us to create <i>bad<\/i> art and pass it off as minimalist.\u00a0 However, we spent some time thinking about minimalism, and came up with an art style that looks great without requiring detailed texture work!\u00a0 Using Blender\u2019s Inset Faces tool with a group of faces selected, an outline could be created in the geometry of the model itself, and then a black material applied to the \u201coutline\u201d polygons to suggest the edges of the object in the white game environment.<\/p>\n <p><img class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-255500\" alt=\"blender-edges\" src=\"http:\/\/www.ludumdare.com\/compo\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/05\/blender-edges.png\" width=\"540\" height=\"180\" srcset=\"http:\/\/ludumdare.com\/compo\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/05\/blender-edges-300x100.png 300w, http:\/\/ludumdare.com\/compo\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/05\/blender-edges.png 540w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 540px) 100vw, 540px\" \/><\/p>\n <p>Objects are reduced to the minimal graphics needed to represent them, but you can still tell what they are.<\/p>\n <div id=\"attachment_255502\" style=\"width: 560px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.ludumdare.com\/compo\/ludum-dare-26\/?action=preview&amp;uid=11515\"><img class=\"size-large wp-image-255502 \" alt=\"Can you tell what it is?\" src=\"http:\/\/www.ludumdare.com\/compo\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/05\/ld26-screenshot-4-550x343.png\" width=\"550\" height=\"343\" srcset=\"http:\/\/ludumdare.com\/compo\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/05\/ld26-screenshot-4-300x187.png 300w, http:\/\/ludumdare.com\/compo\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/05\/ld26-screenshot-4-550x343.png 550w, http:\/\/ludumdare.com\/compo\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/05\/ld26-screenshot-4.png 960w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 550px) 100vw, 550px\" \/><\/a><p class=\"wp-caption-text\">Can you tell what it is?<\/p><\/div>\n <p><b>Minimalism made the dialogue easier to write!<\/b>\u00a0 There is no text in the game \u2013 we explored the concept of reducing language down to symbols.\u00a0 It\u2019s part of the puzzle, but we find it interesting that players can figure out what\u2019s going on even though the characters they meet and the dialogue interface only convey a minimal amount of information.<\/p>\n <div id=\"attachment_255503\" style=\"width: 560px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.ludumdare.com\/compo\/ludum-dare-26\/?action=preview&amp;uid=11515\"><img class=\"size-large wp-image-255503 \" alt=\"What's up, brown cube? You heart flowers?\" src=\"http:\/\/www.ludumdare.com\/compo\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/05\/ld26-screenshot-3-550x343.png\" width=\"550\" height=\"343\" srcset=\"http:\/\/ludumdare.com\/compo\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/05\/ld26-screenshot-3-300x187.png 300w, http:\/\/ludumdare.com\/compo\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/05\/ld26-screenshot-3-550x343.png 550w, http:\/\/ludumdare.com\/compo\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/05\/ld26-screenshot-3.png 960w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 550px) 100vw, 550px\" \/><\/a><p class=\"wp-caption-text\">What&#8217;s up, brown cube? You heart flower?<\/p><\/div>\n <p><b>We pushed ourselves to make something new!<\/b>\u00a0 We are all programmers by profession, so it is unusual for us to have a go at making an artistic game.\u00a0 Violence provides a variety of game mechanics that are easy to build a game around, so it was a challenge to create a non-violent game for a change!<\/p>\n <h3>Bad<\/h3>\n <p><b>Having only one Unity scene meant we couldn\u2019t all work in parallel.<\/b>\u00a0 Unity scene files are binary, which means they won\u2019t merge properly if there are conflicts in the source control.\u00a0 At the beginning of the weekend we were working on separate scenes to test individual systems, but at the end there was a lot of work to pull everything together, and it could only be done by one person.<\/p>\n <p><b>We didn\u2019t get the story working completely until the end of the third day.<\/b>\u00a0 It took us a long time to create all the content, including the AI behaviour.\u00a0 This meant that the story we implemented, although a complete story, wasn\u2019t as elaborate and non-linear as we were hoping.<\/p>\n <div id=\"attachment_255505\" style=\"width: 560px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.ludumdare.com\/compo\/ludum-dare-26\/?action=preview&amp;uid=11515\"><img class=\"size-large wp-image-255505\" alt=\"What's wrong?\" src=\"http:\/\/www.ludumdare.com\/compo\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/05\/ld26-screenshot-2-550x343.png\" width=\"550\" height=\"343\" srcset=\"http:\/\/ludumdare.com\/compo\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/05\/ld26-screenshot-2-300x187.png 300w, http:\/\/ludumdare.com\/compo\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/05\/ld26-screenshot-2-550x343.png 550w, http:\/\/ludumdare.com\/compo\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/05\/ld26-screenshot-2.png 960w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 550px) 100vw, 550px\" \/><\/a><p class=\"wp-caption-text\">What&#8217;s wrong?<\/p><\/div>\n <p><b>We didn\u2019t make use of all the features we\u2019d programmed into the dialogue system.<\/b>\u00a0 By having a minimalist dialogue system, we envisioned that the player would be able to say anything they wanted by constructing the sentences from symbols.\u00a0 That is present in the game, but because of limitations in the graphical dialogue interface, we removed the ability for characters to respond to every piece of information you give them.\u00a0 Also the code allows for much more complicated logical rules &#8211; to change what the characters think and do &#8211; than are present in the final story, but again the GUI is limited in what can be reasonably displayed.<\/p>\n <p><b>Our external source control system was slow.<\/b>\u00a0 The Mercurial repository was hosted on bitbucket.org.\u00a0 I had hoped that this would be a good way of enabling us to continue working on the game together after we had all gone home, but it meant that pushing to the repository took up to several minutes.\u00a0 \u201cWe\u2019ve wasted, like, hours of the competition, pushing to this repository\u201d said Dunk, who has no concept of the passage of time, and who liked to commit huge MP3 and WAV files.<\/p>\n <p><b>In the UK, the competition started and finished at 3:00 AM.<\/b>\u00a0 Technically that would give us more time, because we usually sleep through the theme announcement and start when we wake up on Saturday morning, then stay awake on Monday to work through to the competition deadline \u2013 an extra hour this time compared to the usual finish of 2:00 AM.\u00a0 However working that late is a recipe for introducing bugs into the game at the last minute, so we decided to create a stable build, submit it and go to bed even though we could have stayed up longer to add more features.<\/p>\n <h3>Conclusion<\/h3>\n <p>We\u2019re very pleased with the game we\u2019ve made in Unity!\u00a0 It fits the minimalism theme well, and is playable and fun.\u00a0 We can always think of more that could be included, but it\u2019s a time-constrained competition.\u00a0 <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ludumdare.com\/compo\/ludum-dare-26\/?action=preview&amp;uid=11515\" target=\"_blank\">Please play and rate our game!<br \/>\n <\/a><\/p>","time":"May 3rd, 2013 10:59 am","title":"\u274f\u2665\u2740 post-mortem"}