Play it here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/49/sky-burns-red
Sky Burns Red is a rhythm-balancing game. It's developed in Unity3D, and I made it for this jam, with Dirk Kluesing. I did the programming and art, and Dirk did the music and audio, aside from the song Wither.
Development
Friday
I wasn't immediately inspired by this theme. On Friday, I took a walk, played a game, and just kinda spitballed things for a whole. I came in wanting to do some kind of rhythm game, but I didn't know how to get them together. In the end, I feel like I kinda decided on a ham-fisted approach. Unstable platform + rhythm. The mechanics kind of naturally fell out of that. You could hit the notes with either the left or right arrow. It'd be nice to have held notes (though these didn't make it in). There's an unstable platform that's basically simulated as a pendulum. It gets more unstable as the crowd gets angry. Yeah - that sounded easy enough.
I started by making the pendulum simulator on Friday. It was pretty simple, I'm a fairly mathy person, and I've studied dynamical systems, so the single pendulum came easily. I also implemented a double pendulum that didn't get added in. I decided to manually do this instead of using physics so I could "fake" the physics to make the feel better. There's not a lot of faking in the final product, it's mostly around the way your inputs push the platform around. But night on friday came quickly, and all I had was this pendulum. Surely the beatmap can't be hard to implement!
Saturday
The next day I went to work on making the beatmap. I decided to make an editor in-game. I chose to do this to make editing simpler for me, and I think broadly it's a pretty good idea. I could've made the beatmaps in a spreadsheet editor, but I think this was just a little easier, and loaded into engine very easily with JSONUtility. I made a separate renderer and manager for the editor and the gameplay, which kind of doubled the work, but allowed me to make a really nice, performant game renderer without worrying about the way the editor works. I don't know it was the best choice, but it did work. I made the basic UI elements in Aseprite, and wired it all up. It took me a while to get the bugs worked out, but by the end of saturday, both beatmap systems were starting to get solid. Now I just had to do the rest of the work...
Sunday
Sunday brought in most of the rest of the systems. I got to wiring up a main menu, so I could manage multiple beatmaps. I separated out each of the game states. I made the crowd controlled, and a lot of the little "feel" things of the game. A lot of them were made on a whim. The PERF and BAD things that fly off when you hit a note, the not animation, the crowd's animations and heart/boo things that fly off. All just little things I felt like making throughout the day. I also made the first Trees beatmap once Dirk got the song completed! It was rather uneventful, everything worked. I did spend a lot of time balancing the balancing system, but that was mostly just playing over and over and tweaking. The other big thing this day was art. The game still looked like mostly nothing, so I got to making most of the art you see. I took my time on the background and platform, probably spending 3 or 4 hours just on those. I spent another hour or two on the little people, then brought everything into unity. As I'd set things up fairly well, wiring things up didn't take long. I also threw up the end screens, but that was about all. Technically the game way playable, but there was a lot more to do to make it great.
Monday
On Monday, I only had about 8 hours from the time I got up, and I made the most of it. I started with touching up the UI. Everything was there, it just needed actual assets instead of the unity default buttons. I also made the title screen. I then worked a bit on some different difficulties of Trees. I also animated the braces of the platform to communicate how unstable it was. All of that didn't take long, so I also added powerups. These weren't the best use of time. Their effect was rather slight, and not communicated well. No matter. Once they were in, I had about an hour and a half left - just enough time to throw together another song! I did that. It was a wild flurry of picking synths and putting down notes without too much though. Well - the primary thought was making the song interesting to play. I think it turned out okay in that respect - horribly balanced though. That made it in with one beatmap, and it was published.
Looking Back
Immediately after publishing, I was tired, and I didn't feel great about the game. It worked, but would people like it? It turned out yes, and for a lot of reasons I'd thought about, but didn't really trust. I think this heled reinforce the way trusting instincts on game-feel are really important, especially when compared to just adding more content. This is actually one of the most content-bare jam games I've made recently, but in that, it's the most concise, and the most polished. The game very quickly gets through what it wants to, and that's a good thing. I think if I put a bit more thought in at the beginning, maybe I'd have made better decisions over doing separate play and editor beatmap managers, and things like powerups, but I don't know. In the end, I think the way I didn't overthink things was a big help to this. I never felt stuck, I always had a place to move. In the end, I'm really happy with it. I think in a way, the time limitation kept me from bloating it, from overthinking it, and in that, it felt really good.
Thanks for reading, and I hope you all have a great Ludum Dare!
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/49/manicat
