…or rather, one that seems it’ll work.  The trick was to rip off a game that I really loved from the NES era: Solar Jetman.  The jist of my game (as of this moment) will be simple and unoriginal: You’re stranded on a planet.  You need to explore caves (in a spaceship; none of this platform nonsense 😉 ) collecting items that help you depart from said planet.  It’ll be a side-scroller.  I will use Unity with the help of the 2D Toolkit and/or RageSpline.

I had some other ideas originally but I just wasn’t feeling the prototypes.  This is a bit more ambitious but at least it’s scaleable.

Any resemblance to Solar Jetman is purely taken as a compliment.

I submitted my game, finally.

I am amazed at how much I was able to get done despite slacking on this competition, spending much less than 24 hours and indulging on sleep throughout the process.  That’s a testament to the power of the Unity engine.

My game is “complete”, with some weird non-show stopping physics bugs, bland graphics, using GUI text instructions as a crutch for not having a more discoverable game,  etc.  But it still has an objective and obstacles that must be overcome.  And it’s a sliver of the feeling of Solar Jetman, one of my favorite games for the NES.

You can find my entry here.

Loner Jetman

I have to admit that I wanted to shoehorn one of my existing ideas into the theme, and by pure chance a Solar Jetman-style game was a perfect fit.  I’ve always loved that game for the NES and think it deserves a remake.  I wanted to create it in Unity since I’ve been working with Unity for a while now and love it, and wanted some practice trying new things without worrying about consequences.

The bad

I was unfortunately really tired coming into this competition, having just begun a well-needed vacation, so in total I probably only spent about 10 hours on this game.  As such it’s lacking in polish, has some annoying physics glitches and doesn’t have any real threat to the player.  I needed to hand-hold the player via GUI messages since I didn’t take the time to make things more discoverable.

I would love to release a more polished version of this game but realistically I will be too busy working on my other Unity projects.

The good

Surprisingly, the main mechanic is (in my opinion) fun, and reminiscent of the original Solar Jetman.  I can only imagine how much longer it must have taken Rare to get even basic physics working without the benefit of a modern game engine.  I am personally a fan of mechanics that involve a struggle toward a reward with steady progress along the way which doesn’t get undone.  I like games that start out as hard as they’re going to be, and get easier and easier as you progress toward the goal, whittling away at obstacles.

In the short amount of time that I worked on this game, I learned a lot more about Unity since I wasn’t afraid to try new features to get the job done, without getting stuck in “analysis paralysis”, questioning whether or not I was approaching things the best way.

Having a forum for people to comment/critique the game really gives me motivation to do better for the next Ludum Dare.  It’s one thing to know what I did wrong; it’s another thing to see this reflected in player feedback.

Well, this contest has once again reminded me what I failure I am, as I spend literally hours debugging such trivial things as “why aren’t my health bars displaying correctly”, constantly regressing old bugs, etc.  Sure, I have a Computer Science degree and I’ve worked in the games industry professionally but ultimately I can’t even tackle the most basic of tasks in any reasonable amount of time.  Why do I even try?

I’m in again, hopefully with more spirit than I had in the past couple LD’s I participated in.  I already have a completely messed up sleep schedule, so maybe that will… help?

I plan to use Unity + 2d Toolkit + NGUI and deploying to the web, so I can look forward to spending most of my time fighting with tools when I want to be actually making a game.  I’ll be using Paint.NET for my art.  I have no idea what I’ll be doing for audio so if the time comes, hopefully I can find someone to help.

I’ll blog about my progress at funcodegames.blogspot.com.  I’ve considered live streaming since I recently bought a fancy HD capture card, but I can’t envision a scenario in which I don’t forget that I’m streaming and open up personal files/emails/etc.  I’m not sure how other people manage that.

My goal was to make a game involving an Indiana Jones character roping through dungeons (super-quick-hook style) in order to retrieve a treasure and move on to the next room within 10 seconds, but I have to confess, I’ve never made a 2D platformer before (they always seemed too generic) and getting the physics/collisions just right is killing me.