Hey guys, this is my first time taking part in Ludum Dare and I am determined that it wont be my last.
I had heaps of fun seeing what I could pull out of my butt in just 2 days, and although I was definitely a little too ambitious for my own good, I got lucky and everything worked out great in the end (except for the ‘no sleep’ thing…).
Vestige is a frantic 3D shooter made in Unity with C#; Here’s a quick video I shot right after I entered it showing off how it plays:
Vestige Gameplay with me waffling over it
What went right:
+The game idea was able to be prototyped very quickly and was every bit as fun as I had imagined (maybe even more so :D)
+Randomly generated levels with definable parameters; This was a risky, potentially time costly move, but in the end it worked out great and provides a lot of replay value to the game. They look a little samey, but it sure beats hand crafting a ton of levels.
+Unity. Plain and simple. Unity gave me a lot of tools to work with that allowed me to focus on game design rather than code design.
+Dropping some of my planned enemies was the right move as the turrets in the game provide just the right kind of challenge to make it really fun. I only wished I hadn’t wasted several hours working on them 
Randomly generated levels can look a bit bland, but the action more than makes up for that and it sure beats doing it manually
What went wrong:
– Poor time management skills and family obligations meant that a large portion of the work had to be done in an unexpected 14 hour mad crunch at the very end, finishing with about an hour and a half to spare, but no energy left to do anything with the time.
-No sound… This game would DEFINITELY benefit a lot from even just a few core SFX, but I ran out of time before I could implement them.
-Planned story mode cut, making the link to the competition’s theme quite dubious… It can’t be helped, but I hate that it may seem that this is just another random game that uses some really loose dodgy explanation to justify its relevance to the comp when the theme itself was integral in the initial development of the idea. (You were supposed to be the last of your species, taking your hi=tech craft to deliver some hot lasery vengeance to the villains that wiped out your people and doomed you to extinction)
The over the top intense action seems a little muted by the absence of SFX... :(
Overall I couldn’t be any happier with my entry (despite the aforementioned problems), and now I can’t help but want to expand it and flesh it out into a salable game.
I really had a lot of fun, and I look forward to rating some games tomorrow when I wake up after 1 VERY VERY long nap.
You can grab a copy to play here: Vestige download link