The Most EVIL Breakfast post mortem.

Aww yeah! This was a really fun theme, I admittedly spent the first few hours after I woke up trying to figure out what to do, I’d had thoughts of making vertical shoot-em-ups where you place enemies strategically in-order to destroy the hero plane , some ideas based around towers and tower defense but in my crazy brain they seemed concepts which I thought a lot of people would do and I wanted to try and challenge myself with coming up with something different (at least different to what I’ve done before)

So, I wrote down a list of all the cool things that villains have / do, including:

• Make awesome evil laughs
• Sound like Skeletor
• Own Underground / Moon Bases
• Have hoardes of minions / robots / henchmen to do their bidding.
• Own pets (think the claw from inspector gadget)

Next I thought, what would be a suitably evil task for the villain to perform. Whilst there were the thoughts involving destroying/ taking over the world I wanted my villain to be somewhat more odd, so I thought, what would be really unpleasant and how could it be worked into a game?

Now, mincing up things is a pretty nasty process and kittens are so cute. What could be more evil then sending out robot henchmen to mince up kittens into breakfast? Not much, so I went with that as the idea.

Next I had to think up a look, by now I’d already decided that I wanted to create a 3d world, erring on the low polygon side of things as much as possible with a minimal amount of effort.

The Evil Minion Robot takes form. Mwahahahaa!

Having recently played around with shaders inside unity I chose a simple, colour scheme of red, white and black and let myself run though designing a simple robot, basically from a collection of spheres and then some appropriately scaled world objects.

A Simple GUI

I started playing with animation in unity and was looking into ranged attacks for the robot minion to perform but kept my eyes on the time left and decided to cut that out and reduce it down to a simple cat and mouse affair.

Keeping everything (with the exception of the robot) as low-poly as I could meant for much faster modelling and by the end of the first day I’d got my 3d models all set-up, the beginnings of the world, some movement, and some crazy voices.

The final world inside Unity

But there was one problem which I had to fix and it was important.

What would a kitten sound like being minced up?

Thankfully I had a hand blender in the kitchen so that was an obvious choice for the blades whirring up but it didn’t feel err meaty enough?

Luckily I was snacking on some hula hoops later on and they’re pretty crunchy, so I tried crunching some up with my fingers on the desk, pointed the microphone, overlaid the sounds and eurghh, it really sounded like what I imagined would be kitten bones breaking. Fairly scary sounds!

A while later I found myself not satisfied with just the noise so added some bloody particle effects and a camera shake for extra effect. You don’t ever see what happens to the kittens just the err….end result.

By this time I was feeling like quite a monster for making something like this so it was the best time to do some more voices for the evil villain and give him some level of radio interaction with the menial robot.

After the final sound effects had been made and cut and testing the packaging for the web went fairly smoothly and I managed to spare time to add an android version with some pretty basic controls. I was worried that despite going low-polygon It wouldn’t run well but it seems to run fairly smoothly, even on mid-power devices which is a relief.

In summary. I had a lot more fun then I expected this time around. I’m a little scared it may have brought out an evil side to me but hey, I can live with that,ha!

I honestly love kittens, sadly the wife is allergic to them but that’s probably for the best otherwise the RSPCA /PETA may be on the phone at me, eep!

Oh yes, the entry is playable here–> http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-25/?action=preview&uid=6823