Hey everyone, looks like I'm in this one. I don't have a lot of experience or a plan, but I think this will be a good learning experience that will help me attain my goal of career game development. I'll be using Unity 3D, and this will be my first serious game that I'll be able to commit time to, so I don't expect amazing results, but they're certainly welcome. :smile:

Here are my theme suggestions, which I'll admit are kind of derivative of others:

Limited Resources Decisions have meaning You are the world

GL HF!

In all my preparations for LD43, I failed to do one vital thing: Tell work to buzz off. 😅

My retail day job has scheduled me the most inopportune times for all three days of the jam, so if I do get anything done it'd be horribly low quality. I probably won't have a finished game by the end of the jam, but I might still make something after it's over and post it here.

Well, it was fun getting hyped at least, I'll try to be more prepared for #43. GLHF everyone.

Cortex

Cortex is an infinite procedurally generated, grid FPS, with a multi-mode weapon and two types of enemies that you have to defeat to open the portal to proceed deeper. As you go, the levels get wider and more enemies spawn. It was made in the Unity engine, with models I slapped together in Blender.

Conception

The jam started at 8PM in my time zone, and I went until like 12-2 AM. The first few minutes I did a bit of brainstorming and almost started making a Downwell clone, which I would've hated eternally. My next idea was a Dante's Inferno, circles of hell style thing where you had to reach the center of themed areas to drop down toward the core of hell for... some reason?

Fueled by my inability to do actually good art, and what happened the last time I had to make levels for a game on short notice (see LD47, I almost ran out of time and made half the levels I wanted to), I quickly decided to make it procedurally generated, and to make it with simple models. Simple models lead to simple everything else, so I switched my inspiration from Dante's Inferno to Code Lyoko.

Actually making things

My pattern when it comes to making things is generally not the greatest: Wing it. So I started by making the bean move around and modeling the sphere enemy (more on that later). Following that, the VFX for the sphere's attack, and then to end the night, making a nice to-do list which I followed more or less for the rest of the jam. See here to watch my dwindling sanity.

Multiple Failures

A lot of things that are the way they are now, didn't start out that way.

• The sphere enemies were going to be hollow with interiors, but I couldn't make it stop being invisible from one or more sides, and decided I didn't have time to mess around with it and just changed the model entirely.
• The enemies and quite possibly the terrain were all going to have neon edge glow, but I suck at shaders.
• The weapon was going to be an energy gun, and then a staff (like the jaffa staff from Stargate), and I decided that all my attempts looked pants and I made a triangle. Triangles are easy.
• The arc shot initially had some actually cool VFX, combining a heads & trails with a heads & sparks VFX system to create randomized lightning between the gun and the target; but it always ended up spawning and firing off in some random direction that was definitely not intended, and after spending an hour or more of my rapidly dwindling time on trying to fix that, I gave up and just used a line renderer.

Cut Plans

There are also some things I wanted to add to this that I didn't get to, due to time (because of course)

• Another enemy type: It would've been pyramid shaped and use its body to hit you from the ground.
• Tiered enemies: Same enemy types but with color coding for their difficulty, think like in breath of the wild, the regular enemies vs. their white, black, red, etc. variants with different skills.
• Actual feedback on being hit, and hitting enemies so you actually feel like you're doing damage, and notice when you get hit.

Reflection

Overall this was still a really fun project to work on, and I'm pretty much happy with what came of it. As is generally the case, it was a bit overscoped, even without any planning, so some bits definitely suffered in favor of others. This was definitely a great learning experience, from which I gained some useful skills for the future.

The Future

I'm not sure when (or, to be honest, if) I'll get to it, but I do really want to expand this game. I would add the things that I had to cut, make the visuals and atmosphere a lot better, with some sick electronic beats throughout and general sound effects. Maybe that music would be responsive to your depth? There are loads of possibilities with this project and I'm glad I got it at least to the point it's at. Thank you all for the great experience during the jam, and also thanks for reading, maybe check out the game and leave a rating? :smiley: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/cortex

Here we are again on the other side of my third Ludum Dare.

Core Meltdown was the result of a very bumpy development ride. While it probably provides a few minutes of fun, it is far from what I wanted to put out. As it is now, you run about clicking on five different objects throughout the scene, trying desparately to hold the increasingly unstable core from melting down. The frantic running around and ~~glitching on the sides of platforms~~ is kinda fun I guess, but here are a few things I would've liked to include:

• Multi-part tasks, such as having to press a sequence of buttons on a panel
• More tasks and decoration in general
• Certain tasks showing a display to complete a mini-game a la Among Us
• Animations on anything at all; the wheel doesn't spin and the lever doesn't flip
• Some sort of visual indicator of where your task is, like an outline that shows through the level

I think if I had gotten to any of these things it would've come out a more enjoyable game, but as usual it was a victim of over-scoping and changing plans.

Overall I still look at it fondly. At the very least I got some practice modeling, and made some mechanics I had never made before. The interaction system being the main one, this actually took four times as long to get right as I was expecting. Turns out you want to catch raycast collisions in FixedUpdate, and use that value for input on Update. Raycasts in Update returns null for some frames, and input in FixedUpdate misses inputs in some frames.

This was a great learning experience and while I don't see myself taking it that far beyond this jam, it provided a potentially fun frantic concept, and some knowledge I didn't have before.

Thanks for reading, and if you want to give Core Meltdown a try, my entry link is below. After some feedback, I went back in and added a mouse sensitivity slider to the pause menu. That's the only difference between the patch version and the jam version on itch.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/49/reactor-core-1