Bouncing Knight: Post Mortem!
First, here’s the game for anyone that wants to play it! All feedback is greatly appreciated! Link
Post Mortem
This is my third Ludum Dare, but the first time that i’ve dared to make a post mortem! 😀
The Preparation:For some time now I’ve been trying to improve my programmer art, I always felt that my games were lacking in that aspect. But the road of the artist was no easy one for me, most of the things i found were very hard to manage and the result was not appealing enough. Mostly due to my lack of persistence and laziness. Luckily, in my search for a good Art pipeline i found Inkscape, with it’s auto correct tool and power strokes the results looked pretty good! With that and my usual Paint.net + Unity + Anvil Studio + SFXR , my setup was complete and I was ready for the Ludum Dare! Or was I?!
Theme Breakthrough:When the theme came out, my mind was blown. At the beginning i was so confused that i even thought that “TIED: Two button control and Growing” was one only theme. After rereading it multiple times and finally understanding what it was about I started to think about which one would fit me better. To tell the truth I just wanted to do something simple, but with a twist. The first idea that came to my mind was about a knight that kept on getting bigger and bigger as it killed his enemies, but the growing part and the level getting small sounded complicated, so i discarded the idea. I kept on thinking about other ideas for a while and then… BAM! It hit me like a train! A knight that keeps on jumping up and down! It sounded fun! And it was a 2 button control, so I started the development right away!
First steps:The first part that I implemented was the bouncing mechanic, it wasn’t too hard, and even tough it had some glitches with the side walls, it was working pretty good. The next part was to start to make some art, surprisingly enough, the knight looked like a knight and the weapons looked like weapons. By the end of the first night I had the bouncing mechanic, and one enemy that was just standing around. Things were looking great!
Things were looking good by the first half of the first day. Some of the enemy AI was implemented, weapons were functional, I even had the system to pick weapons up. And then, when it came the time to implement the camera, It all started to go wrong!
In the beginning I wanted to make the camera follow the player. This way i just had to design one enormous level and the player could just navigate around it. But the camera following the player felt horrible! I couldn’t figure out a way of doing one big level without becoming dizzy from the camera after 5 seconds of playing. Other solutions were a bit more time consuming, but it looked like I had no alternative. So I buckled myself up and I started to implement a roguelikeish type of levels.
The first problem I encountered was that I had no experience on using any Tilemap editors like Tiled… And i surely didn’t have time to learn and create a pipeline to export it to Unity. So I searched a bit more and I found that in Unity you can move the sprites around snapping them to the grid if you press Ctrl while doing so! That was great! I was able to design levels already inside Unity and a lot faster than learning to use Tiled!
In the end the map ended up being quite big, 13 levels, and the level design consumed a lot more time than I had planned! Only half a day was remaining and I still had to create music/story/final boss, and polish the game as much as possible.
The Final Countdown:
With more coffee than blood running through my veins I faced the last few hours of this ludum dare! The music ended up coming good and the boss was simple but effective! I also had to cut the story short and only put a small introduction. But in the end the game was finished!! I was happy with the result and there was only one thing missing! Uploading it!
With Unity it’s fairly simple to upload, But some things like the particles on picking up coins were broken in the process. I didn’t have time to fix it and they didn’t look superhorrible on WebGL, so I let them be.
After the succesful upload I went to sleep with a smile on my zombie face! Another finished Ludum Dare!
Thanks for reading! Hope you all enjoyed your Ludum Dare as much as I did! 
