Play it here
Background:
Now that the dust has settled, and I’ve had time to recover, I thought I’d share my experiences from completing my first ever game jam. Let me summarise by saying it was amazing!
I’ve only been doing game dev since around June and I decided to enter the Compo to really push myself. This is also the first real game that I’ve put out into the world for people to play (and judge) so it was a really exiting experience for me.
The game:
In Retro Rocket Run! you must make the choice on whether to collect or avoid the abundant coins.
Collecting them will help improve your high score but may also kill you…
The game gets progressively more difficult the longer you stay alive, so stay sharp!
Concept:
So the theme was “The more you have, the worse it is” and rather than go down the route of making the game progressively worse (more on that in a bit), I thought it would be fun to make a game that became more and more panic inducing as things started to spiral out of control.
I think I nailed the intended experience when I add the power-ups that toggle state, so triggering one required you to collect more coins to undo the effect. In that time, it’s highly likely that you then trigger other togglable effects which escalate the problem.
The best reaction I’ve seen was from a player who had their controls inverted, ended up near the spike barriers, couldn’t remember which way to turn and then became invisible!
What went well?
I really didn’t want to lose too much sleep over the jam and made sure I still ate.
On the first day, I broke up the game into smaller tasks and set about completing each one in turn. If I ran out of time, I parked what I was doing and moved on. This gave me a reasonable working prototype at the end of the day, so I could judge whether the game was fun and worth finishing.
On the morning of day two I went back through the list and spent time bug fixing and improving assets. The afternoon was then spent panicking over the bugs I was struggling with, and trying to add some polish to the game.
Whilst I didn’t get everything into the game that I wanted, I got enough in there to make it playable and fun.
I’d have loved to add more “power-up” effects and give each one a unique visual cue when activated, but time is a cruel mistress.
I also wanted to add more level sections, but I thought 12 was enough and I’d already spent more than enough time on them, so other things had to take priority.
What went Wrong?
If you’ve played the web build then there’s a good chance you’ve seen some dropped frames!
Lag was something I struggled with through the whole of development and is something I only really got a handle on in the last few hours before I submitted (the game plays fine on the machines I tested it with).
This all comes down to the number of coins present on screen and how I handled creating and destroying them. Now, there are plenty of fancy tricks that could solve my problem, but none that I thought of right away and none that I could afford to implement in the time I had.
Instead, I chose a rather weird approach of deleting several coins each frame until the level block became light enough to destroy safely.
It’s not the best way to do it, but it was quick and it seemed to work!
On the subject of the coins causing lag. I also made a stupid mistake when creating my levels. Rather than setting up the coins first and then creating the levels second, I pretty much did the exact opposite.
I was keen to get something working on day one that I didn’t really think about how I’d update the levels later on. So when I changed the coins on day two I then had to go back and redo all of the levels I’d previously finished. This ate up valuable time and was the reason there are only 12 level blocks in the game.
Luckily, adding new levels is now really easy, so I’m planning on releasing a post-compo version with way more level variations!
Now, I’m a programmer and not really an artist. However, I roughly know my way around Blender so figured I’d be able to make some half decent models.
I’ve never really done any modelling under time pressure before, so this became super stressful when I’d finished my block models and wanted to add some extra details.
First (and last) up were the coins… ah, those damn coins again. After making some pretty good-looking coins, I threw them into my game and wham, the whole thing started grinding to a halt! The extra geometry was making the whole thing worse, so I then had to go back and redo some lighter versions in an attempt to get the game running again.
This only left a small amount of time for the spike barriers and the ship, so these will definitely be first on the list when it comes time to rebuild the game.
Conclusion:
So there you have it. It wasn’t the easiest development cycle but I’m super proud of what I created and I think I’ve created a fun experience that people can enjoy.
One of the hardest parts of the compo was the lack of help. If you have a problem there’s no one to help you out. Haven’t worked on the sound yet? – tough. Need to redo the models, tough!
That said, it was a fantastic experience and I learned so much from entering on my own.
It’s also been a great experience post-submission. Seeing people enjoy my game and getting to see what others created has been incredible and I’m really excited to take part in the next Ludum Dare.
For the next one I’ll probably enter with some friends, but who knows? Maybe I’ll push myself to do the Compo again and see how much better I am in a few months.
Thanks for reading and feel free to ask me any questions (and let me know your high scores!)
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/retro-rocket-run-has-arrived
