Pirate Space Crafter. is a 3D Puzzle/Sandbox game where you are a Pirate Gunsmith of space.

Craft items by dropping objects into 4 differents machines and get something new as a result ! You can follow the instructions of your Pirate Space Lord that will ask you to craft several weapons ; or simply play in your own with the many possibilities and get some weird things. You have over 40 possibilities. Good luck !

This is my first LudumDare. I've already made a bunch of other GameJam (2 Solo - 6 with a team). So I knew how to avoid some traps !

* LudumDare 42 - Stress, things that went good and wrong *

It was a really cool Gamejam for me. As I worked alone, there was no miss miscomprehension. Nothing went really wrong (except the texture import into unity that look bad). I'm really happy with the end product. Doing a 3D game alone in 72 hours is Hard ! And I managed to do some Story with a (terrible) Voice acting, I had the time to add Subtitles (without it no one would understand what i'm saying with that accent). And the Game Lifetime is close to 15-30 minutes which is cool for a Gamejam game !

So yea! Good experience for me :)

* GameDesign *

As the theme was "Running out of Space". I tried to remember some Gamer experiences I had where I was like "I need more space !". My first thought was SimCity 5 (lol), and Factorio. In factorio. Belt, machinery and everything take some place. Even if the map is infinit, you always need to connect that part of the factory to that other part. And you finish by having everything everywhere. Sometimes you also have entire part of your factory not working. But you don't figure it out quickly because everything is a mess.

So I wanted the same thing for my game; A bunch of items in a small place where you finish by having everything at your feet, not knowing what you did of your uranium bar. As always my Game Jam gameplay idea come very quick. In 10 minutes I already knew where I wanted to go.

* Programming *

I already made a bunch of prototype and one GameJam with Unity. I know how to script things (Even if i'm not so good at gameplay programming for the moment; Working on it !).

I used ScriptableObjects for pickable items data (storing it's name, and the objects it produce if it goes in the furnace, the compressor or the Electrolizer). And also putting a reference of the Prefab of the object itself in this ScriptableObject. And for the object of that item, I put a reference of that ScriptableObject data file in a script called (Object_Manager). Yea I know, It's a little messy. Here is a screenshot :v:

For the machinery, it only launch a bunch of instructions in a Coroutine with somes 'Wait' in it. It only get the Gameobject that are inside the "Transforming zone". Get the Item_Data that contain the Gameobject (yes the Scriptableobject) and will retrieve what item it should result from the transformation. And then spawning the Object ! Simple.

* 3D Modeling *

I used Blender. I started by modeling the LowPoly version of the object. Then I duplicated the Lowpoly and applied a Subsurface modifier to add polygon at the edges. Then I simply exported both Lowpoly and Highpoly and baked them in Substance Painter. Simple as that. I did 4 machines, and more than 40 meshes. I needed to go fast, that's why some assets are quite bad looking sometimes. Didn't had the time haha !

* TEXTURING *

• Software Substance Painter :

As a student in a video game school. I have access for free to a bunch of softwares. Like Substance Painter who helped me a lot with texturing my 3D meshs very very quickly. I used the Stylized Smart material of 3dEX (paid). Smart material are a real thing of Substance painter who allow artist to quickly get realistic PBR material. As I wanted a more stylized render for my game. The material of 3dEX do automatically a great render by pre-coloring curvature, thickness, ambient occlusion... Substance Painter also bake Low-Poly from High poly to put this overage of information into Normal and height map. After that you just need to push some buttons and pull some lever to get the most tasty result.

BUT - I Said BUT. I never used Substance Painter for Unity. I only did with Unreal Engine. the shader graph of unreal is more beginner-friendly that the new buggy Shader graph of unity. So as every Gamejam ; The nightmare begun.

As you probably noticed in the game, you have weird black area on machines and sometimes on items (Like the Iron and Uranium bar). This is because of black magic. I don't know what messed up in my process. And I don't want to get my hands back in it. Maybe something do to with the compatibility of how the shader on unity are coded compared as the one in the Substance Painter software. But everything was different from Sub'Painter compared to the render I had in game. (And nothing do to with light, the black area on my sprites eat light).

Here is what I get on Sub'Painter.