I just finished implementing (for the most part) the item and farming system for my LD34 submission, “Aina.”
I was hoping to have this entire game done in time for the Compo, but it seems like I’ll have to submit during the jam so I have enough time to add combat and slight polish. If all goes well this will be the first Ludum Dare where I actually finished my game on time 😀
It seems like everyone’s doing one of these Post-Mortem things, so I guess I’ll make one too.
This was technically my second Ludum Dare because I attempted to submit a game to the last Ludum Dare, but I didn’t finish in time because I unfortunately had to go to school on the last day of the Jam. The same problem happened again this time around, but more on that later.
Luckily the theme(s) this time around were much easier for me to get an idea for immediately and start working on it. My initial idea for the game, which I didn’t stray extremely far from, was a game about trying to survive by growing crops on a growing island. After enough time had passed and you hadn’t starved to death the island would have grown large enough to reach something else floating in the distance, like a floating door or a portal and the game would end after you walked through it.
The very first thing I started working on was of course, the player controller, which I finished within the first hour of the jam if I remember correctly. So I was off to a great start considering I had never made a first-person character before and started modeling the island the game would take place on. At first I decided to go for an extremely low poly look so it wouldn’t be too difficult to extrude and grow the island:
But then, just out of curiosity I tried subdividing it a little bit and hardening the top edges so it looked something like this:
It looked much better with the extra polys (at least in my opinion) so, after thinking about it for a bit, I figured there probably wouldn’t be enough time to program something as ambitious as an island that actually expanded during gameplay while also making sure the game is actually fun to play so I decided I would just model the island in chunks that gradually are added over time. Thinking back on it, that was definitely the right decision, although I only had time to make one extra chunk.
The game is a survival game, so like all good (and bad) survival games I needed to let the player cut down trees. I quickly modeled an axe and even made a swinging animation for it, but then when exporting it to Unity, I learned that apparently Unity only supports skeletal animations. I quickly hopped back to blender and redid the animation, but this time using a bone to move the axe. At this point I had already spent way too long on it, so all of the other held items ended up not having animations. In Heinz-sight it might have been possible to use the same rig and animations for all held items, but unfortunately ideas like these don’t seem to come to you when you’re frantically working on finishing a game.
Here’s a quick gif of the animation
Around this time I was also thinking about what kind of enemies should be in the game, if any. It would have made since for them to have been some sort of animal that eats crops, so my initial idea was for the crops to be carrots and rabbits would pop out of the ground and try to eat them. The only problem would be that it would be kind of sad to kill cute, hungry bunnies in a farming game so I also considered having them be evil killer rabbits instead.
Of course I quickly realized that it was impossible for me to do this within the time limit as well, what with having to rig and skin paint the bunny model, so I switched to flying enemies. They ended up being pretty cool, and I ended up spending way too long making cool particle effects for the robots blowing up.
The simple texture I made for the explosion particles.
The end result.
It was already the night of the second day, and I knew I would have to go to school come morning. As daylight approached I got more and more nervous about not finishing in time. After a little bit of playtesting I realized it wouldn’t be fun to have to wait for the island to grow. So to fix that problem and to give the player more incentive to grow carrots I made a character that was trapped in a puddle that needed to be fed carrots in order to grow the island and I also made the carrots grow almost instantly so you didn’t have to wait forever for your first carrot to grow during the tutorial but accidentally applied it to the entire game. It made the game less slow though, so I let the bug become a feature. (this inadvertently made the mulch item that decreases growth time practically useless, but I didn’t realize it then) I was almost finished but it was too late. It was already morning and time for me to leave. I checked the timer for the deadline and after factoring in the time for the submission hour I realized I would about an hour or two after to finish the game after school. I went to school, slept a little bit through some of my classes (fellow students, please don’t follow my example) and got back to work the moment I got back home. The game was “finished” about 10 minutes before the end of the submission deadline so I threw a Windows build together and submitted it with only a minute left on the timer. It was done and I could finally relax. Shortly after I also released a Mac and Linux version as well.
Summary:
What went well:
-The combat against the robots is actually more fun than I thought it would be and the explosion effect they make is probably my favorite thing about the game
-The simple visual style turned out nicely. It fits the mood of the game quite well.
-Growing carrots while watching out for floating robots is a good way to make something that would normally seem like a chore fun. You can’t just relax and get bored because you have to make sure you aren’t about to be blown up.
What went poorly:
-BUGS! When I initially released the game there was a bug with the inventory that broke the game. You couldn’t continue because you couldn’t pick up any more items. Thankfully I managed to patch it the next day, but I also kept the original download links up on my itch.io for some reason.
-Sounds. The game is severely lacking in the sounds department, and feels slightly empty because of it. There’s no music (probably because I don’t know how to make music) and the sounds that are in the game are pretty simple, I made all of them just by playing around with a microphone.
-No death notifications. Sometimes when you die it’s seemingly for no reason, and it’s mostly because I had to quickly add the death feature in only a few minutes so it just arubtly drops you back onto the main menu after you die. This might also be in part to the robots always spawning behind the player, so the player might not even see them before getting hit sometimes.
This was a very fun experience for me and is also the first time that I ever put one of my games on the Internet for others to see. It’s pretty cool knowing that other people are playing something that I made.
I’ll be looking forward to the next Ludum Dare!
Here’s a link to the game if you want to try it out: Aina