Heya, everyone! I want to take a moment here and do a retrospective on the development of our Ludum Dare 56 entry, Duke Flywalker's Crap-tastic Adventure.
Day 1
The first day began with us getting the theme and brainstorming ideas, mostly about did and did not constitute a "tiny creature". After removing joke ideas like Pikmin and Smurfs, our idea board looked something like this:
Admittedly, not the most innovative of lists, but it got us started on the road to creativity. Our idea ended up involving a fly collecting piles of poo and taking them home to his family. Originally there was going to be a spider as the villain but that got cut for time reasons. Here's our initial map concept diagram.
Once the jump ability was axed (As @floata3 said to me when I was struggling getting the jump to work, "Flies don't jump, Bud!"), we opted instead for the ability to glide. The fly had its wings damaged (a throwback to an anecdote of my cousin once turning a fly into a walk by taking its wings off - true story, sadly) so it couldn't fly very well, and we also decided to lean into the 'tiny' part by making the poo piles too heavy to easily climb and glide with, as they weighed the fly down.
By the end of our livestream on day one, I had made the fly's 3D model twice and made the poo pile model. Before I went to bed that night I remade the fly model one last time to the one currently in the game.
Day 2
Day two began with us finally making the actual levels. I insisted on making the first two as instructional tutorial levels and left the rest up to @floata3. We drew our maps on index cards to keep them simple and compact:
We spent most of day two on that, laying out the levels using simple cubes. I opted for a barn thing for the end goal instead of a house, nest or flag, because honestly, the chance to combine "fly" and "barn door" was just too tempting. Here's a look at what the levels looked like in the editor:
Once done, we wrapped the day's stream and I got to work modelling the levels in 3D. I opted to, rather than my usual piece-by-piece approach - to model each level as one 3D object. This began by taking a screenshot of the level from the editor:
Taking that reference image into Blender and scaling it so I could work from it and modeling the level as one monolithic mesh. The resulting mesh looked a little something like this:
Finally, with the modeling done, it was time to texture the thing. Opting for a simplistic look for the level geometry (with most detail spent of props scattered around each level), the finished product looked like this:
The only place I went a bit overboard on my design was the back wall, where I opted for a three-dimensional pattern that is completely lost in the flat 2D view.
Day two closed with the levels done, the graphics pretty much complete, and the music from @floata3 worked into the game. All that was left was the sound effects.
Day 3
The third day dawned with sound effects as the goal. As I hemmed and hawed about how to make the fly's flying noise, it dawned on me that I have something that buzzes - an electric razor. I recorded that and pitched it up for the fly, and then used a more heavily modified version for the buzz saws, as well. (btw, do you get it? Flies buzz? Buzz saws??) All of the other sound effects were made from other nearby items like pop bottles and some vocalizations. Unfortunately I recorded many of the sounds too quiet, and attempts to ratchet them up distorted them to an unpleasant degree, so they got left as they were.
All told, we finished and submitted our entry with an hour or two to spare. We're happy with what we made, but what about you? Have you rated our Crap-tastic Aventure yet? If not, now would be a great time to do so!
