Well I just realized this was happening this weekend and I’m not busy, so why not? I’m going to challenge myself and enter the compo.

Here’s how I’m doing things:

• Engine: Unity
• IDE: Visual Studio
• Audio: sfxr for the sound effects. Not sure on the music, I’ll practice making some ambient beats with FL Studio tonight.
• Graphics: Simple shapes in Unity. I’m not an artist.
• Streaming: No. This is my first Ludum Dare so I can’t really afford the distraction.
• Preparation: Tonight I’ll see what I can make in a couple hours to get a little practice.
• Fuel: Cocaine (Nah, just a 12 pack of Hot Pockets and 6 liters of Mountain Dew)

All in all I’m very excited. I’ve never tried making a game in such a short period of time so I’m very curious to see what I can do when I push myself to the max. As for what category I’m most excited for? I would say “You Are The Power Source” looks very intriguing.

I can’t wait to see all the amazing games everyone creates!

Progress is finally picking up. I unfortunately lost a good 6 hours to struggling to get the tile system working, but now I think I’ve finally got it.

I have a 2D non-physics based character controller setup along with platform-snapping camera follow system. I’m going to get a little sleep then start on the main mechanic tomorrow.

Here’s a little gfycat of the current progress: https://gfycat.com/ActiveDazzlingAfricanfisheagle

I bet you can guess what my unconventional weapon is.

We have firepower

Play Bad Tummy Bunny now on my submission page!

I would definitely say this was a weekend well spent!

After a grueling 48 hours and a night of decent rest, here is a postmortem of my first compo entry, Bad Tummy Bunny.

What went right:

• The concept – This idea was the first thing that popped into my head. After about 15 minutes I had almost everything laid out in my head. The KISS principle really helped out here so no time was wasted coming up with ideas.
• The graphics (mostly) – I’m a horrible pixel artist. This is the first time I’ve ever actually created anything decent. Coming into the compo, I was very worried about what I was going to do for visuals. In fact, I was just going to use geometric shapes, but I felt that the theme really required some relevant visuals. The biggest thing that helped me was having a color palette and sticking to it. This really makes things easier when deciding what colors to use for things. The whole game only uses about 32 color (this doesn’t include the fart particles). I did end up spending a lot of time on the artwork though as a result of not being experienced, especially with the animation. Overall I’m pleased with how it turned out, but I could have saved a lot of time and probably added another enemy if I knew exactly what I was doing.
• The sound effects – Fortunately the concept made doing the sound effects a trivial matter. I actually recorded and implemented all of them in the last hour or so before the deadline. Making fart sounds and eating carrots in front of a microphone is so much damn fun. I felt like I was 12. Side note, if you’re trying to come up with generic little jingles for things such as hitting a checkpoint, a ukulele is excellent (that’s what I used for the flagpole sound). Think outside of the box as well. The walking sound was me crinkling a plastic bag.
• The coding – The only way I was able to achieve the polish I did was having an existing codebase. For the camera, movement (not farting), and some of the AI, I already had written a lot of code for my other game I’m currently making that I was able to adapt for this game. My workflow was very similar and it allowed me to implement most of the gameplay mechanics very rapidly. Already having my own coding pattern made things a lot easier. The most difficult thing to write was the fart logic (lol), but that could still use some work.

What went wrong:

• My OCD – I like to spend a lot of time tweaking anything I make because I want it to be perfect. There were several times that I had to remind myself that I was on a strict time limit and needed to move on so I could actually finish.
• The tile system – I lost about 6 hours at the start of the compo trying to get a working tile system. This is the first time I’ve made a tile based game so finding a working system was a pain. In the end though I did get one working that made making the actual level very quick and easy. This one is more of a neutral point because the “wasted” time early on lead to great timesavings later on.
• The controls (sorta) – I feel like this was more of an issue with running out of time than having a broken concept from the start. The issue is that your fart propels you in the direction of your mouse, but there isn’t any visual feedback to convey this. Once you figure it out, jumps are still pretty difficult due to not knowing the exact trajectory you will take. Given more time, I would have added an indicator to show the arc of your jump as your charge up.
• The menu (or lack thereof) – Once again, I ran out of time and wasn’t able to implement a proper menu system. The only form of a menu is the retry and quit buttons that show up when you die. I really wish I could have added a title screen, especially since I had an awesome idea for it. Having a pause menu would have been nice as well.
• The variety – You’re probably sensing a trend here. I didn’t have enough time to add multiple types of enemies or coins. A second enemy type would have greatly benefited the game, but creating the artwork would have taken too long. I also originally wanted to have different size coins. I probably could have done it, but I didn’t want to risk cutting it even closer than I did. Maybe if I had skipped on a couple more hours of sleep, who knows.

What’s next:

Overall, I’m very pleased with how everything turned out. There’s some things I wish I could have added or fixed, but for my first LD, I couldn’t be prouder. That said, I am planning on continuing development. I feel that given the context of the game, I could flesh it out and turn it into a full-blown app within a couple weeks. I think this would fit perfectly on mobile, and so far most of the feedback I’ve received agrees. My hope is that I can make a couple bucks off of it and use it to fund development of Boss Wave. I hope you enjoyed my “little” postmortem, and you get a gold star if you actually read the whole thing!

Hey everyone! If you haven’t played Bad Tummy Bunny yet, go give it a try!

Play it here!

I didn’t realize that LD34 was this weekend until I got the email saying good luck!

This will be my second LD so I’m excited to see how I do. I already have a good idea for “Two Buttons” as well!

If you’re interested, you can check out my first submission for LD32 “Bad Tummy Bunny!”

For this LD, I decided to challenge myself to write the code in a way that was decoupled from Unity. Previously, all my game development has been done the classic Unity-like way of having MonoBehaviours for everything. In my current large project, this led to me having to take a break from working on it because that code was getting very difficult to expand. I ended up getting myself stuck because everything was too tightly coupled together to expand the way I wanted to.

That’s why with this LD I wanted to try a completely different way of making a Unity game. Objects only have a single, small MonoBehaviour; and all their logic is divided up into multiple reusable components that have as little knowledge of each other as possible. I did mostly accomplish that goal, but near the end of the Compo all I have is a framework with a little bit of game starting to form on top of it. From the outside, I did much more poorly than my first LD; in which I both finished, and actually placed in the top 100. To me though, this LD was still a win because I can incorporate this framework into my other games. Also, now that I have all this figured out, things will hopefully go much more smoothly in future LD’s.

Even though this is extremely incomplete, I hope you can learn something from my code.
https://github.com/PachowStudios/LudumDare34

I’m still going to finish up as much of it as I can, or at least enough so that it’s playable, and submit it to the Jam.

Good luck everyone,
Keep it ?