Better little late, than never!
Introduction
This was our first Ludum Dare competition ever and, to summarize the experience, it went really well! First we were a little confused on how everything works and during the second day we were really paranoid on our participation status on the whole event. But when the submissions opened up on the old site, we were relieved to see that we were doing everything right.
We already discussed about potential game ideas before the theme was announced. We’ve really liked playing this game called “Crawl” together and we thought, that we could do something inspired by it. We ended up with the idea of doing “reverse” Crawl, so that you’re the final boss and your job is to get rid of the heroes, that try to kill you.
When the theme was announced, it was really easy to decide how we should approach our idea. If you’ve ever played any RPGs or MMORPGs (I’m 99% sure you have!) I’m sure you have noticed that in 70 – 90% of those the boss fights happens in only one room.
What went right?
We chose to do the game using Unity, because that’s what we both were most familiar with. Both of our background is in programming, so our first problem to be solved, was which of us was going to do the art and music. At the end we chose that I’d do the art and we’d both work on programming and music. So the first thing that went right was the art. It was really minimalistic, but it did it’s job.
Programming-wise, I think we made a good job on eliminating potential bugs and the final game was quite polished. We dedicated the last day on just doing polishing and testing, so that there’d be no game-breaking bugs. We noticed for example that if you kill the wizard while he’s casting his spell, the wizard dies but the fireball still stays. We made it so the fireball explodes after certain amount of time, so it’d serve as a “landmine”, if the player got too close.
All-and-all, for our first Ludum Dare entry, I think everything went quite smoothly.
What went wrong?
Audio was something we didn’t dedicate much time. Although some of the music were really memorable, it didn’t always fit the tone of the game. We wanted the game to have a somewhat “humorous” feeling with dialogue and gameplay while the art and audio should have been a little more “serious”. I don’t think we achieved this. But still the game is fun play, which is more important.
I think what we should have also thought is how we were gonna build the game on different platforms. For example, when we were packing the games and uploading them for submissions, we saw that the WebGL build couldn’t load the main scene of the game. I think this had something to do with instantiating too many enemies on the start for the object pooling system. Also we didn’t have any time to test the Linux and Mac builds, so we had no idea if they’d work or not.
If there is something to say about the programming, it’d be one thing: Polymorphism. For many classes we did too much just copy-pasting other classes and modifying them, when we should have made more base classes to inherit from. I think we made 3 different classes for the monsters you can control and all of them were inheriting from MonoBehaviour, although there were many functionalities they had in common.
In Conclusion
Just as I wrote in “What went right?”, making of our game went smoothly from start to finish, with minor problems here and there. I think we have learned much from the whole event. We’ve never really published our own games anywhere, so this was really good opportunity for both of us. The whole Ludum Dare community has been really helpful and the feedback that we’ve gotten is really nice. It’s really nice to see that there are communities that like to rate your game fairly and all the trolling is nowhere to be seen.
Hope to see more awesome games in the next Ludum Dare! Definitely going to participate again! Thanks for the opportunity and good luck for everyone on their future games!
Boss Room Ludum Dare page
