It's done! My first ever game jam, first ever game built with unity (or any engine for that matter), as well as many other firsts, and I'm exhausted. After spending the first few hours of the jam still fumbling through bought but lightly used Udemy courses in unity, trying to figure out how I'd implement some basic mechanics, I'm somewhat shocked I managed to get something done on time. It's no masterpiece but it's something.

The unity project started out as something reasonable but quickly morphed into a spaghetti monster that if hunted would provide enough to feed the whole of Italy for a month. Drag and drop components into various script fields, access variables across objects like everybody's variable belongs to everybody (comrade), but in the end it all somehow kinda works.

Made fairly heavy use of UI components without really having any ideea how they work and it almost got me in the end. Had my Game view setup to the ludum dare embed resolution the whole weekend only to find out about 20 minutes into the submission hour that a bunch of stuff no longer aligns on any resolution not exactly matching that resolution (and the embedding does not enforce anything). Thankfully managed to fiddle with the project settings enough to generate a build with the specific LD resolution constraint and no webgl full screen bar. The Simpson back fat meme is real.

While I was fully aware of how you must always reduce your scope cuz you aint gonna have the time, looking back on my original feature list, it's amazing how much I thought I could get done. I've never drawn a tile map before in my life and yet here I was planning a city level with buildings, and sidewalks, and hey if I have some extra time maybe some lightning for a cyber punk aesthetic. Yea right.

The jam theme was something I hated on Friday. It seemed gimmicky and not my kind of thing. I figured I would just do something random and ignore the theme. Forced myself however to try and think of something and in the end I'm quite happy with the direction it took me. We're flooded with information, notifications, subscriptions, pop-ups, etc, and I liked trying to shine a light on this ideea of overstimulation by taking it to the extreme. Even managed to get some kind of story out of it. Nothing I'd take to her parents of course, but something that could potentially grow.

Finally, this concept of over digitalisation reminded me of a mural I've seen in a tube station in Bucharest. I've pictured it above. Below is my derivative work built on top of my 16px character:

A classic case of Tinder Profile vs IRL.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/51/aberration

You think you get too many notifications now? In the future you will get them every 10 seconds, and you will check all of them out. To not do so would be considered an aberration.

This is where the jam theme took me for my submission "Aberration" (https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/51/aberration in browser ld embed playable) - my first unity game and gamejam ever.

Here is a dev diary in pictures and gifs:

Saturday

Wire up the notification timer events and subscribers around 2 PM:

Not freezing Z rotation is never not funny:

Finally done with the two main "enemies" in the game: surveillance systems, and NPCs. Get too close and you get influenced back into mindless consumption.

It's getting dark outside, and I'm really questioning how the hell am I gonna turn the above into a game. Oh and I also want to build a separate mini game to simulate hacking surveillance terminals. Scrapping the minigame is not really an option as I need it to tell the story.

Play around with some lights and a trailrenderer and get something going:

It's getting late but at this point I feel I at least have the basic mechanics down. Close to midnight, I get started on some tile art.

Moved on to characters. Thankfully 16x16px is not a lot of pixels, and I get a few characters done quite quickly:

Time to sleep.

Sunday

Wake up feeling optimistic, I have most of the pieces in place and should be able to combine them into something by the end of the day.

Minigame tiles sort of done:

Combine them tiles with the above lights and trail renderer and get this (some scene elements not shown for no spoiler reasons)

Take the main tilemaps and game mechanics and the first level is built

The rest of the day I fiddle with the editor, tile pallets, ui elements, and try and put everything together. End up with two levels two mini games and a decent amount of writing and story.

I get ambitious for my title screen art for all of about two minutes before I realise im never going to have the time. I do get the main concept done however and use it as a logo of sorts.

Finally with about two hours to go I get started on sound. - Pick the whirly piano in GarageBand for it's soft dreamlike sound, improvise a piece on my keyboard in the only key I sort of know, and boom, got my first original song ever. It's not much but it's honest work (I'm actually surprised how much I don't hate it) - you can have a listen to it on the title screen. - Smash the generator buttons in sfxr, mess with the sliders a bit, and some sounds effects are now also in the game.

With 60 minutes to go I spend about 45 trying to get the webgl output to look good in the LD embed window and finally get it done.

What an adventure this weekend's been. If you'd like to try my game I'd appreciate any feedback. Playable on the LD game page here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/51/aberration

You think you get too many notifications now? In the future you will get them every 10 seconds, and you will check all of them out. To not do so would be considered an aberration.

This is the story background I came up with in relation to the jam's theme. I tried creating a dystopian world where content consumption is what drives everybody and where you play as a character immune to this, set on a search and destroy mission looking for the controlling mainframe recommender force feeding everybody new content.

If this sounds like an interesting ideea I'd really appreciate any feedback on my compo entry Aberration (playable on LD, or via windows/Mac builds). Getting really close to that 20 ratings magical number!

This is a reference image I found quite inspiring for this concept (mural in Piata Romana tube station in Bucharest):

I tried reproducing it in my title screen using my player character

Not quite the same artistic skill, but it's something. As my friend would say, this is classic Tinder profile vs IRL meme material :)) You can check out the game/title screen in action here.

Would've gone for more but given my skill level and time limits it's about the most I could do. I do hope to extend and polish this in the future as the jam entry proved in the end to be quite inspiring and feel like there's more to be done with the ideea and would be a great chance for me to improve my skills along the way.

I also published another ld post with a dev diary in pictures/gifs here if you're interested seeing the behind the scenes of a noob trying to put a game together.