I’m doing the competition. First time for me!

Engine: Unity 4

Language: C#

Sound: sfxr and a little digital recorder and some stuff around the apartment

Art: Graphics Gale and Photoshop

This was my first Ludum Dare, and really my first 48 hour challenge. That being said my main goal was completing a game in time and feel pretty good about what I accomplished.

Break down

The theme was announced at 9pm where I am, which was quite nice. I stared at it for a minute, panicked for a minute, and then started sketching a handful of ideas. The sketches gave me composition and my unconventional weapon. I spent about 3 hours thinking and committing to nothing, before starting the ghost character and going to bed.

I made about 12 of these panels.

Saturday, 8am

I spent all of Saturday morning doing pixel work, making the elements I’d need in the scene. I didn’t touch unity until I wasn’t sure what to pixel. From then on I worked on things somewhat arbitrarily: a bit of assembling, a bit of code, a bit of art, dash of sound, little UI.

Plus

• Sketching Phase was well worth a couple hours. Not only are there a few other decent game ideas in my back pocket (I am absolutely making that uni-brow game), the game avoided most of the obvious solutions to the theme. Ghost Prosecutor wasn’t my first idea, nor was it my fifth idea. I think it was number 7?
• Time Management went quite well. I slept both nights. I even took a shower on Sunday! I could have accomplished more, but my spirits were high and everything I had set out to do++ got completed. Can’t shed any light on how because I more or less winged it until 4pm Sunday when a list was made of what to get done.
• Weirdness. I didn’t want to replicate anything that could easily be categorized. The game was inspired by classic fighters and so used many elements to set that up, but it certainly isn’t a fighting game. After all you’re not really fighting and nothing is fighting back.
• Working on all things simultaneously was great for me. The moment I started hesitating was time to work on something else. It was surprisingly efficient and could continually make solid progress.

Non-Plus

• The only code I had already was an audio manager (that still had to be modified). Learning how to make a fighter type game during LD ultimately failed. Every move HAD to end in only one ‘attack’ key or it would trigger too early. (The only way to use Here’s Johnny is to hold the up button and rapidly button mash z and x).
• The game mechanic doesn’t seem well thought out. That’s because it isn’t. I had planned on using a more DDR based mechanic and was fickle about it. It felt too easy/too rigid. I’m much happier with the fighting mechanic, however, using the player ‘health’ as a timer was confusing and the gavels were a last minute decision that doesn’t make sense. I should have given the jury some kind of authority to challenge the player. This would have been an easy way to balance the difficulty and solve the combo spamming maneuver that made easy victory.
• No play testers play tested. Many guesses were made because there were no people around. I tried to keep it simple and give enough clues so players would figure it out on their own. This was somewhat successful, but I could have targeted ambiguous areas early if I had just called on some friends. Judging by the amount of people who had difficulty with combos, simplifications should have been made.

At the end I’m glad I did it and will likely do it again?!? It would be way more fun doing it in a small group (even if we were making separate games.) Thanks to everyone who played my game and voted and commented and participated. If you’d like to try the game it’s HERE.

See you all again,

Allen