INTIAL QUANDARIES
Being my very first Ludum Dare, I had a lot of questions for myself and the jam, mainly that revolved around my decision to use Unity (a program I just started learn a week in advance!) for it’s ability to export to multiple platforms (specially since my main system with all my graphics and audio software right now is a Mac)
THE THEME
I literally fell to my knees and shouted for joy on the announcement of this LD’s theme! I love the concept of minimalism and small worlds/single screen games.
I had TONS of ideas going into the Jam and actually started programming on at least 4 of them!!!
TOOLS / SKILLS
I’m a graphic design by profession and degree but I come with a background history of programing since my father got me started creating little game concepts on Visual Basic since I was a teen. I also love music and making my own electronic tracks and playing new instruments.
So naturally taking these skills and combining them into on 48 hour game sounded like pure joy condensed into a palpable thirst quencher!
Tools used:
– Unity 4.6 with both C# and Javascript
– Photoshop and a pen
– Garageband
THE GOOD
– I MADE (what can loosely be labeled as) A GAME!!!
– Despite my lack of Unity knowledge prior I was able to get the core features down within 48 hours
– The dynamic audio system I wanted finally worked after trashing the idea and redoing it three times over
– I finally settled on a visual design I could be somewhat proud of
– Ability to expand this come Post-Compo
THE BAD
– Scrapped and restarted SEVEN different ideas (of completely different genres and gameplay) within the first 15 hours (SO much wasted time!!!!)
– WORST OF ALL: I ended up fixing a simple problem with idea #1 and went all the way back to that one!!
– Had an obligation that took up 6 hours of day 2
– A core mechanic of the path following based on collision detection on corners of the track was broken from day one….I just never play tested long enough until the end of day 2 to notice that the mix of realtime audio listening and collision based turns resulted in the note placer object to be just a hair slower ever time it hit a corner eventually resulting in the player to overtake him and be in-front of the notes by 1.5 minutes in!
– Fixing the above took 2 hours of struggling before I just went old school and manually typed in the X,Y coordinates to turn at for each corner
– All this lost time = No visual or audio feedback for players, only one song/level, really vague instructions, a dull menu, no program icon (total inexcusable to my graphic designer side!)
SCRAPPED CONCEPT #6 of 7 (only one I have screenshots of)
Reason: I got the music to spit out notes from left/right side of screen towards the 3×3 grid where the player would jump from square to square and dodge….I just could get my head around how the random angles of bullets would fair with such a fixed movement system
FINAL (and also ironically my First!) CONCEPT
Result: A music-based, twitch game I’m VERY happy about…and if I can’t make more than one level…might as well sell it as a feature! 
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**** NOTE: I will be making a version 2.0 very soon! So please don’t rate my game (I have enough, go join the Rescue Rangers) BUT DO leave comments on improvements and features you want to see, THANK YOU! YOU GUYS ROCK!!! ****
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Tags: beat+trak, ld31, post-mortem, postmortem
