So, it's one of those times of the year again...
How big is the world of your imagination?
First of all, here is the game. It is a user-generated puzzle game, that is, users create their levels and upload for other users to play. The goal of the game is simple: Reach the exit! But to do so might prove difficult, since each room is governed by a potentially complex puzzle. But, since those are user-created rooms, it might be just a scenic ride.
For players, the goal is simply to amass the most points you can. Completion points (green flags) are awarded for reaching the exit, and spent to destroy slime barriers. The other kind of score is diamonds, which can be found inside chests. To open a chest, you first will need a key, which might be hidden or locked somewhere else in the level.
The idea behind this game was to simply give each player a constrained space for them to exercise their creativity. The trigger system, while not completely intuitive, is very complex, capable of receiving user input, aggregating conditions and propagating those changes to other objects.
On the gamedev side of things, this is much easier for me since I only need to design enough levels to get people interested in making their own. At any point in the game, you may enter edit mode and see exactly how each level is made, which serves as a simple form of "documenting" the editor.
The process
Preparations
This time, I've made sure there were no major interruptions during the Compo weekend, so I had all those sweet 48 hours to focus on the game. I chose technologies I was familiar with, that is, Unity and Blender, so there was no learning curve or remakes.
The Theme and the Idea
When the theme was announced, I was stumped.
How in the world will I create a game about a small world?
I mean, that worked before. My first LD was #23, which was about a "Tiny World" (or something along those lines). There had to be something!
First thing I thought, was of how the Internet brings people together, and makes the world "smaller". The game idea would then be that the player is part of the Three Letter Agency, snooping on the online and physical lives of random people to find a suspect. The player would be able to see camera footage, phone call recordings and social media posts & bio of everyone in a very small "town". But then I realized the scope was huge, and scratched the idea.
Still with online in mind, I thought about a mini turn-based RTS, where each player starts on a face of a 5x5 cube and had to conquer all other 5 players to win. But then I realized I'm shit at writing AIs, would take too long to implement properly, and no way in hell would there be 5 Ludum Darians playing at the same time.
Then I was reminded of my very first LD game, which was following a similar theme, and was a puzzle game. I decided to take inspiration from that, but still there was something missing. During a 5 minute existential crysis I noticed how people's minds can be so... small sometimes... so boxed into a few alternatives, and somehow that made its way into the game idea:
A game of creativity where you struggle to make the most of the limited resources to do something polished and functional. In some ways, this game is a meta-analysis on LD and Jams in general.
But hey, it seems to work! So let's get going!
Development Story
The first thing I tackled was a system for loading a bunch of Unity prefabs given a JSON recipe. This would become my level format.
Then, after handcrafting a (very claustrophobically tiny) level by hand, I had to put a player on it! Here comes Mr. Capsule, my old friend, and a simple mouse-directional movement script. A fine detail of the player controller is that you can actually run if you move the mouse far enough from the character. AAnyway! Scope!
Erm, did I say "scope"? Then I certainly shouldn't have had proceeded to work on this:
First screwup: Spending 3 and a half hours on a player model is not classified as efficient time usage! Well, at least I can say this is the best rigging job I've ever done (not that I did that many of those)!
Ok, deviation done. It's been 16 hours since the reveal already, back to work!
The rest of the first day and the morning of the second were spent writing and debugging the trigger system and writing the level editor. Everything went quite fine during this period, but I really spent a lot of time with Unity's UI. Too much hassle to data-bind! (and I had to release with bugs anyways)
The last 12 hours were spent on writing the behaviours for brazier, chest, and scoring, and also creating the 3D assets. Everything went mostly smooth. The only issue I had was writing the scoring UI and blocking interactions with the chest when you don't have a key.
Final hour! All that is left to do is add some music. Since I have an innate -70 musicality modifier, I used Otomata to generate it, and recorded the output. This results in a pretty random/chaotic BGM, but better than nothing.
Deploying everything was a bit of a hassle, because I used the MonoUpgrade branch of Unity 5.6, I couldn't cross-compile to Mac/Linux, and for some reason on WebGL the UI disappeared, so the game ended up being Windows-only (but if you want to play on Mac, you can get the appropriate version of Unity to compile the game yourself! Check the GitHub repo for details). The LD website wasn't accepting my images, probably due to request timeouts, and Itch.io took a bit to upload the zip to. But it worked out, with 30 minutes to spare!
...or did it?
THE SERVER!
I had forgotten to change the server URL when building the game, causing everyone to get connection errors because the game tried to access localhost
Reupload everything... Check if the web hosting didn't explode. But it did! I had to delete the project and re-create the database. (which was simple, but still, time!) (000webhosting sucks)
Now I'm done! With 12 seconds to spare! Success!
Conclusion
This was a good LD. The theme unfortunately was a repeat, I wish there would be a policy so that doesn't happen. But good anyways. Everything was for the most part not on fire, which is a huge plus in my opinion. The resulting game was a bit underscoped and simplistic, but it ended up quite stable, at least.
Farm Fortress 2
The original Farm Fortress, from 2013
