ORBII | Devlog #3
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After struggling with Google Drive and then Dropbox yesterday night, i did manage to submit and now have my third LD behind me.
Coded until 2am, one hour before the deadline, which was quite the contrast to last time, where i finished about 10 hours or so early. As a result, i now have my so far most fleshed out submission. I focused on getting some details right that i got wrong last time. Easily readable text, quick restart that doesn’t take you through the whole intro again, and faster gameplay. While my first LD was a Wario-Ware type of game, or rather the poor try of creating one, my second one an isometric shooter, i now came up with a puzzle game. I love Ludum Dare for this. Making me try out very different concepts.
Visually i have stayed close to my last entry. Low Poly, flat-shaded 3D.
I love that art style, and i used only a slightly modified version of my Perlin-Noise Script from last time to animate the water of my planets. I also used Perlin-Noise to generate the land-masses. That works so well with the low-poly style it is really awesome. It also means that every round played looks a bit different, even though the terrain isn’t actually relevant to the gameplay in this case.
What i did not have to do this time was to actually model any assets. I only needed the generated planets plus some 2D buttons to get the exact look i was going for. I try to achieve a visual style as effective as possible for Ludum Dare, as there is simply not enough time to properly model or even animate assets. Spending hours doing so will hurt the game in the end.
Coding this thing was, typical, a matter of realizing in the last minute that my i’m-just-gonna-copy-and-paste-all-this-code-mentality does, in fact, not work. I underestimated the complexity and amount of variables i needed, and thus decided to just “quickly” copy and paste that little bit of code for every single turn of the game, and “quickly” adjust the variables for it.
After that ate up 1.5k lines of code,the smart boy that i am understood that this is not the way to go, and automated it all. Which turned out to be not only more effective, but also so ridiculously easy that i must wonder why i ever even had the idea of copy-pasting in the first place. Oh well. Ludum Dare Code. It really is typical.
“I am sure i will be smarter next time”, he said and moved on.
So far the reactions have been really positive.
But, to not only talk about myself, but about the whole fun that is Ludum Dare, here are some games i have enjoyed especially much so far, and that i strongly recommend you to check out. No, really, this is a good list:
Light Year Wars
by nicotuason
Close Your Eyes
by nonetheless
APOLLO
by graebor
Tin Can Internet
by fserb
Sideline
by Vandash
John and the Arbitrary Gem Hunt
by SteveSalmond