For this LD I decided I should try out something new, and boy did I ever. The Gathering was designed as a 2D puzzle/town-planning minigame, and ended up being a 3D low-poly, resource-management town-builder with a semi-realistic day/night cycle and atmospheric fog/haze/hues that change as the day goes on.

I thought I’d go through the things I think helped me get through this competition, and what I’d do differently next time.

What went right

• Day 1 was gameplay, day 2 was art & tweaking – this meant that I had a fully-working game that I could play with for all of day two. I wasn’t worrying about game-breaking bugs or missing features while I was modelling or playing around with balance.
• I went with what I know – While I did use the opportunity to branch out a little (into 3D games/art) I used C# in Unity, which I’ve been working with almost daily for the past year and a half. It meant I knew straight away how to get a lot of the game off the ground, and any tricky bits weren’t compounded by having to learn a new engine/language.
• I tried something new – I spend every day working on games, and a lot of it is the same stuff over and over, so I thought I’d use the opportunity to try something different. I’ve never done a 3D game before, and having a 48 hour deadline focused what could have been a really daunting task. I was forced to go low-poly because of the time limit, and this meant I could try/fail fast and then learn a lot of 3D techniques. If I was doing this in my spare time I’d probably still be working on that first model, trying to get it just right.

What went not right

• I didn’t think about first impressions – everybody who I’ve shown the game to has cooed at the graphics, and then said “so what do I do?” There’s no hint system or back-story ingame, and so as a stand-alone game my entry fails pretty hard when it comes to user-friendliness. If I could, I’d make a more intuitive UI, or introduce the game a little before it starts.
• Not enough juice – Juice is super important. I’ve seen gorgeous-looking games that fall flat, and pretty ugly games that win everybody over, purely because of the amount of juice in them. Things like easing, bounces, sound effects, etc. could have made my game a lot more engaging. Always plan for adding juice.
• No real forward planning – I had no idea I was doing a 3D game until about 2 hours into planning my game idea. So all of the 3D stuff I had to learn as I went. A little bit of forward planning would have saved me a ton of time and headaches.

Overall, I’m really happy with how this competition went for me. I spent a solid 16 hours each day working, and got something done that I’m proud of. I hope I can do the next Ludum Dare; I’m excited to see what I can come up with next!

You can check out my game, The Gathering, here, if you’d like to play it. I’d appreciate any votes!