This was my first LD entry, and it was a really awesome experience! Even with all the bugs lack of polish that went in the submitted version, I really liked how it turned out and I do intend on keep working on it and see where that goes (so I guess this would be only an LD post-mortem.)
Darkvision is a horror platformer, inspired by classic cinematic platformers such as Oddworld and Heart of Darkness. Peer into an evil parallel dimension to reveal the way as well as hidden perils!
I’d say the biggest issue I faced was one of scope, which I’d assume is something fairly common in game jams, specially for the unexperienced (this was second time participating in a game jam.) Doing a cinematic platformer in itself was already a not-so-prudent decision, since the mechanics are fairly complex for a jam entry. And sure enough, it took me the whole saturday just to get it all working, even if lacking a lot of polish. Still, I had been meaning to do a cinematic platformer for a long time, so there’s that.
Halfway through saturday and the character could grab ledges… but not climb them.
After the platforming mechanics were fairly stable, I went on to making a couple of traps (falling boulders and a deadly blood geiser) which opened up some possibilities for the level design. I was a bit worried about the visuals though, since I’m a programmer and I only draw a bit, but I definetly can’t paint (as in colors, depth, shadows, all that.) But I did find that working with textures had a very interesting result, specially after drawing a bit on top of them to simulate depth to the objects. Also using Unity’s lighting system, the game was even more prettified.
By the end of day 2 the scenery was looking very spiffy. But the eye thing did look like a Dorito.
On monday I had to work during the day, so I only had about three hours to work on the game before submission. In those three hours I change the eye’s color, textured the character, fixed a bunch of little problems (like the fact that each body part of the character was too far apart from each other in the z axis, which screwed up with the lighting) and did 5 out of the 8 levels in the game. It was intense!
A quick rundown of everything that went on:
The good:
- The whole thing was way too much fun!
- Learned a lot from the feedback I got here.
- It was also a very cool experience to work alone in this, as you have to juggle around with what needs to be done.
- Learning about using textures this way was very good, and it might come in very handy for me in the future.
- I got a good notion of how the lighting works in Unity (even if I still have a lot to learn)
The bad:
- I really wish I’d managed to put in a few more levels.
- It also kinda sucked that it didn’t have a menu screen or a tutorial (something simple, just the key images popping up in some places in the beginning.)
- There were tons of little bugs and improvements, but there just wasn’t any time left!
A few lessons learned:
- Using textures is an easy way for a non artist to make things look pretty!
- Feedback, feedback, feedback! A lot of people who played the game didn’t realize what chanting to the orb did, the eye thing definetly wasn’t enough feedback. (To be fair I did plan to have some blood splatters and stuff that you’d only see in the evil dimension, but still.)
- Before making an animation in Unity that changes the position of something, but very very sure you won’t have to change anything afterwards. I had to change the z value of all the body parts to fix the lighting problem, which meant I had to manually change all the values in all keyframes of all animations (you can’t tell Unity to ignore one axis of the transform, even if you’re not using it in the animation.)
All in all, it was freaking awesome, I can’t wait to participate in the next LD! Congrats to everyone who participated, even if you didn’t manage to finish.
If you haven’t played Darkvision yet, please give it a try and tell me what you think!
Tags: postmortem
