A Postmortem for Gnomon
Check out my Jam game, Gnomon: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/gnomon
And here's a little bit about the development process/postmortem:
For the engine, I used Unreal 4. I'm more of an artist than a coder, so I exclusively used Unreal Engine blueprints for this project.
Friday night was mostly spent coming up with ideas. Ultimately I settled on the following: "A game where you have to keep the evil at bay just long enough to be strong enough to defeat it. You can delay the evil by resetting a central sundial or prism, and have to collect objects or activate monuments through the world to gain full power before fighting the impending evil."
On Saturday, I created the basic world where the game takes place. I went back and forth between making the islands float in the sky, but decided that regular islands would be fast to create with Unreal Engine's landscape tool. I added grass (super simple; just triangles stretched vertically with some edge loops in the middle, then deformed in world space using the SimpleGrassWind material function), bushes (lots of planes arranged in the shape of a sphere), dandelions, (tall cubes with edge loops and a sphere at the top) and and a sky sphere for the clouds (some cloud images with Photoshop's various filters to make it look more painterly.) I added some obelisks as the monuments, since they are a very simple shape as well and seemed to look good. I modeled a test character in Blender using MakeHuman as a reference, then made the Djinn in the same way. I didn't really texture them beyond a generic cloud texture with some filters applied. Animation was all done using Mixamo, so that saved me the time of having to animate them by hand.
On Sunday, I started implementing the boss fight with the Djinn; scripting events, initiating the boss battle, what happens if you don't get to all the obelisks in time, etc. My wife helped me come up with the progression, and with ideas for the main character. Towards mid-Sunday, I realized that I wasn't going to have time to create the character I wanted, ended up just using the character I made as a test, even though I didn't feel it really fit the rest of the game's style. Pretty much all of the gameplay and event scripting was completed by Monday.
I spent almost all of Monday working on the music in Ableton and getting it to work in the game. I didn't start implementing sound effects until about an hour before the deadline, so I picked what I thought was important and didn't get sounds in for the rest. In between working on those things, I worked on some general polish, such as adding hills to the landscape and working out the countdown timing.
In conclusion:
Originally, I wanted the player to have to fight enemies with a sword to activate the obelisks, but the enemies and melee combat had to be cut entirely. I also had to cut some of the Djinn's other combat abilities simply because I didn't have time to make the more complicated ones work.
I had to look up a ton of tutorials throughout, as I didn't know how to do a lot of what I wanted to do, but for the most part I think it turned out great. There's a ton I would change, and so much I don't like about it, but in the end I was able to finish, and I was able to do it by myself in a weekend, which I am proud of. I also wish I could have worked in a team; making everything work on my own was so stressful, even in 72 hours. I don't know how all you solo devs do it for the Compo; you're all insane, and all the kudos to you for it--I don't think I could. I feel I could have done a better job if I had at least another person to help, so maybe in the future I'll look into working with a team. Oh well. :smile:
If I had any advice for anyone:It would be to keep your scope small, and then make it a little smaller. Come up with simple ideas and expand upon them, so that if you have to cut anything due to time constraints, it won't affect the rest of your game negatively. Do whatever it takes to shorten the time you spend on certain tasks, and try not to get too involved in the tiny details. :sweat_smile:
I also made a walkthrough video of me playing through the game, start-to-finish: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJBRl73pOYE
Anyway, back to playing all of your games!
