I figured I may as well pull together a postmortem post for this game as I did last time, though I don’t have a flashy time lapse as I only streamed like 8 hours of development… and twitch didn’t save the stream, so I guess I’ll post a gameplay vid.

And a link for those who may not have played it.
Quick rundown of how the time was Allocated:
Friday night: Get 1st person controls working, build basic dungeon pieces, experiment with shader properties until I got it looking the way i wanted to, then built the first floor. Tried to go to sleep at 3am (EST) but ended up thinking in bed until 5 about potential gameplay.
Sat: Woke up (7am) and started work (and streamed) development of the Dialogue system, as well  as the patrol AI for the Knights, finished off the stream with the backstab animation. Ate. Built the models for Knight and the players arm and dagger (and had to rebuild the backstab animation) as well as other objects. Slept 1 am.

Sun: Woke 7am, Build the UI system to prompt interaction, rebuilt the dialogue system to allow for items to be delivered through options. Build the knight walking animation, then the NPC Imp model + animations. Finished off UI interactions and wrote the script for the first floor, followed by rebuilding the dialogue system again to allow for events to occur based on dialogue. Started audio production (footsteps, stabbing, getting seen) and then whipped out my guitar and recorded 3 little improv songs. Finished my time by freaking out because it turns out that unity wasn’t packing in one of the shaders I was using, so the game was unplayable, and fixed it in the last 10 minutes of submission hour.

What I learned:
-Don’t work on something if it isn’t really that relevant to gameplay. While the dialogue system would be great in the full game, building a multi-choice dialogue system for a few quick conversations is a little silly. I decided to do it because the mental image of the full game had dialogue, but gotta realize where I can cut time.

-Don’t underestimate Audio: fiddling with audio ate up a substantial potion of my time, from recording music, to sound effects to making sure they worked well in game. While I am happy, I didn’t set enough time to do other effects. (doors opening, enemy footsteps, ambiance)
-Always do a test upload before submission hour: I was an absolute wreck at this point, as I had no clue how to fix this particular issue. The shader missing made the whole game unplayable, which I ended up running through every build, graphics, quality and other config menu and finally found a way to FORCE unity to push that shader into the build.
What I was surprised that worked:
-Backstab Animation: I always hate doing animations, but getting it to work, and feel clean and comfortable all came together really easily. Though sometimes, despite my code the knights slide a bit too far away, nothing too wacky.
-The Double Shader: If you watch closely, everything actually is being hit with two edge detection shaders, one white and one black, which means in the light, edges are black, and in dark, white. This makes the counter play of light and dark a lot more interesting to look at.
Will I continue work on the game?
Well I definitely wanted to take some time off post-ludum, took in some of the other competitors (at the time of writing I actually have played and reviewed over 80), but I think I am going to bump the floors up (you were on 7, moving to 5th) and finished the last two floors. I was going to be more thorough, add a lot of extra gameplay concepts, but I think I’d prefer to save those for a full proper game that would be sequel to it.
In the 2 floors it will likely just be more challenging interpretations of knight patrol patterns ending with hint on what the full game based on this would be.

Anyways, thanks for your time, if you haven’t played it yet, you can do so here.