I finally finished the theme slaughtering

Me and hopefully a buddy of mine are in and will be using unity. This is my second LD and I'll hopefully make a better game than last time when I did it while on holiday sailing

I'm finally done with my second Ludum dare game Sacrificial city. I feel really proud of what I've made though I' really tired and and have school in 9 hours.

Sacrificial city is a city builder where you create an Aztec inspired city while sacrificing people or captives from other towns to keep your doom level from reaching zero.

If you play my game please let me know how long you survived.

I'm back after a 6 years hiatus, my last one was Ludum Dare 43 in 2018. Have managed to always either be double booked or just remembering that its coming up about a week after the jam. But now me an two buddies are in, and I'm super excited to finally be back in a game jam.

For this Ludum Dare me and two of my friends (@canaguia and @eikaloinen) decided to join forces and make a game for the Jam. We are all computer science students, so our comfort zone is programming, but in addition they both are comfortable with 3d modeling and I can do music. We did a bit of preparation beforehand, mostly just setting up a GitHub repo and initializing our project in Unity.

Then when the actual jam started, we slept! As the theme was released in the middle of the night for us we prioritized being fresh when actually beginning and so didn't start working until 9 hours into the jam. After some brainstorming we wrote up some simple pitches of which we ended up deciding between a first person horror game and a side scrolling exploration game in the deep biosphere (thanks for the inspiration Kurzgesagt). Of these we ended up deciding on the former, what would become Don't Wake me Up.

With a pitch the final step before starting development was to scope it out. Here we came up with quite a few of the signature parts of our game: the cryocasket fueled by soda cans, the idea of trying to sleep out the apocalypse, an oxygen system which would also double up as fuel for your air gun. Of course we also planned way too much, multiple levels where you would repeatedly go to sleep and wake up in an increasingly hostile environment to search for more soda cans.

Development started with immediate problems, one of my friends couldn't get their github to work, which combined with him having other obligations meant that he would mostly do creature modeling and animations which we could then import outside of git.

I started off with building our player controller and an interaction system which could then be inherited from and modified to suit whatever need we had. This saved us a lot of effort over the development. Meanwhile my other friend worked on our player model and after that the basement with the cryocasket.

Then we ran into some more trouble with github as I realized we had accidentally added half a gig of assets to git LFS, which basically ate up all of our allowance for that. So I had to put 2 hours into getting that fixed. We ended day 1 quite strong with a player working well, quite a few nice models, the first music trac and a start to our level design.

Day 2 went much better most of the day, and the big thing we did here was deciding to switch to a pixel renderer which added so much to the atmosphere of the game (as well as covering up mostly my art crimes with environment texturing).

Other than that things mostly chugged along, we finished our level design, added the crawlers, some VFX, two more music tracks and finished the actual game play loop, ending up with just one level (no going to sleep and waking up).

Then just as we were wrapping up in the evening and making our first WebGL export we hit another huge bump. Our beautiful pixel visuals were suddenly and inexplicably blurred.

And hunting down what caused this was what we spent almost all of day 3 on (other than school), but we just couldn't figure it out. Finally with only 7 hours left on the Jam I found it: apparently Unity uses the mobile render pipeline setting object for WebGL which we hadn't noticed, and in it the game is rendered at a lower resolution and then upscaled. And when we finally figured that out we could turn our attention to fixing the lighting, as none of the lighting we had used during all of development worked with WebGL, meaning we instead had to move to pre baked lighting which ended up being really nice.

All in all we are super proud of what we achieved, and really happy with our final game. And our main takeaways for the future is to make sure to have your development environment set up before the jam. And to start building your game early as the editor isn't always representative, especially if building for WebGL.

Thank you for making it through this wall of text and if you did please check out our game.