Wrecked
My second LD experience and it was just as awesome as the first. This time around remote deving and using Git/BitBucket source control and it worked out awesomely for our workflow.
I really like how we planned our design out, because it had 3 distinct phases planned. If any 1 of the phases were complete there would be an experience there. Whilst we only managed to finish the first phase – which is quite a shallow experience – I’m pleased with how much content I managed to create. I don’t consider myself to be an artist that can work very fast but I find LD to be the perfect event to try increase my work speed. I phaff way too much and LD’s time restriction really helps you call “Done” faster, mostly because I think of Done as Done, for now. I’ll come back and clean you up if we got time, and we did.
The first iteration of the character animation was a two solid graphic states with wobble animations that lasted 10 frames or so, I then revisited the character to make a cut out animation with multiple graphic swaps for different body parts and I think it turned out awesomely. It’s the first time I’ve animated properly in the new unity animated editor, it’s far better than before, but still lacking BASIC functionality that all other 3d animation editors have.
That’s really the number one lesson I learned this time round: Make art fast and dirty that covers the extent of what you planned, then revisit and clean up the really bad stuff.
Iteration is King and spend your time where you’ll “see” it the most. Because of whatever reasons your games scope isn’t as big as you first planned, the asteroids you painted didn’t get put in because of X. When you only spend 10 mins on it it’s not going to be so bad that it got cut, you also need to reassess every half day or so to find out what assets you should be making or not, figure out if you still in good standing to complete the scope you have planned.
We planned out a ship phase in the first 20 mins of the dev which didn’t happen. Because of our reassessment on day 2 (at which point I had mostly completed what we needed for the suit phase) meant that I had the time that I would have been spent working the ship on improving the quality on what we already had going.I’m by no means the guru of time management, but I do believe I did a really good job this time round with where I spent my time.
Play Wrecked here
Watch my timelapse of the art for Wrecked dev here:
Tags: 2d unity, LD28, post-mortem, timelapse, unity3d
