I don’t know if these posts are required or not but I’m in for this round of Ludum Daring.

I’ll be using Unity and Playmaker and my game will most likely be some sort of fps.

I just finished submitting my first Ludum Dare: ‘The Tater Conspiracy’ I submitted for the jam category but stuck with the Compo rules.

What is the Tater?
Where did they come from?
Why do you care?

All these questions and more may or may not be answered in:
THE TATER CONSPIRACY

The Tater Conspiracy is a First Person Treasure Hunt
Find the clues, solve the riddles and discover the truth behind the Tater Conspiracy

I’d love for you to try my game:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=14993-Korda

*Mac, Linux and source files are still uploading (big files!)

Hi,

I thought I would force my thoughts on how my first Ludum Dare went on you all.

I created ‘The Tater Conspiracy’ which is a first person treasure hunt game and my first jam game completed solo. You can play my game on my LD page here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=14993

Theme: I was honestly suprised at the theme when it was announced. I am a 3D artist so I was concerned that the theme would be very programmer-centric (like weird physics). Instead we got ‘minimalism’ which is an incredibly broad theme but one that suited me well enough.

Ideas: I really only came up with two ideas: one was a Rez-esque racing game the other was the treasure hunt I ended up making. The reason I chose the treasure hunt was so I could try out some mechanics that I hadn’t done before that would help me in future game projects I have planned.

Programming: I am not a programmer, I have played around with Game Maker and Action Script but I do not know how to write code for Unity (my engine of choice). Not too long ago I discovered Playmaker; an add on to Unity that allows code illiterates such as myself to create state machines visually. This was the first time I have attempted something of this scale with Playmaker and it performed beautifully. The game mechanics revolving around picking up and dropping items was fairly easy to implement and debug when I encountered them.

Art: Art was constructed in my 3D Package of choice. To save time models were not textured just assigned a colour value. Lighting was switched to a linear workflow and was baked in to give the game a soft natural look. Unfortunately Baking takes for ever and I had little time to optimize it for the best effect.

Problems: My game was over-scoped, too many unique mechanics. I had planned to enter TTC into the main compo but since I was out most of the first day I had to push for the Jam instead.

Baking takes forever! And because of that when I had to make some level changes to fix an error I ended up with some weird lighting on one of the fences.

My maze was unwinnable. I had accidentally put a wall that cut my maze in two! I only found this out after several people had played my game and got stuck. I have since fixed this but it meant several hours of reuploading (because the files are pretty big and my connection sucks).

This was a wonderful experience and was a great test of what I am capable of and what Unity and Playmaker are capable of.

The Tater Conspiracy can be played Here

Thanks for reading!

-Korda