{"author_name":"peterthehe","cat":"LD #33","comments":[],"epoch":1440439080,"likes":3,"metadata":{"p_key":"13865","p_author":"peterthehe","p_authorkey":"46596","p_urlkey":"49127","p_title":"Lovers on a Park Bench: Post-Mortem","p_cat":"LD #33","p_event":"LD33","p_time":"1440439080","p_likes":"3","p_comments":"0","p_status":"UPD5","us_key":"46596","us_name":"peterthehe","us_username":"\/author\/peterthehe\/","event_start":"1440115200","event_key":"29","event_name":"LD33"},"text":"

“‘Lovers on a Park Bench<\/a>‘ is essentially a typing game following the story of a square, his ex-girlfriend and a series of intense and very-confusing-at-times metaphors and allusions (they’re pretty obvious). All of this is topped with narration by award-winning robot voice, Stephen Hawking (or whatever Audacity can do to emulate it). “<\/em><\/p>\n

\"Screenshot5\"<\/p>\n

At about this time yesterday, I had just gotten home, having spent an hour stuck in the rainy gridlocked labyrinth Londoners know as the M25, Junction 14, staying lucid on Classic FM. I hit the power button on my computer and opened up Unity – my game was in an alarming state. I had implemented core gameplay and music the previous afternoon: moving, parsing and all; however, the game that I had envisaged seemed unfeasible. Now, a mere 24 hours later, I’m sitting here; the game\u00a0finished with an load of overwhelmingly positive comments (thanks goes to everyone who played it \":)\" )<\/p>\n

So, here’s a slightly truncated insight into the hours spent throwing this game together.<\/p>\n

Scheduling<\/strong><\/p>\n

For any game-jammer, timing\u00a0is key.\u00a0The bulk of development was done from 5pm through till 12pm, with regular tea and basketball breaks throughout. Now for some street smarts:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Cola works better than tea which works better than coffee.<\/li>\n
  2. Doing exercise helps clear your mind.<\/li>\n
  3. Vague schedules work best. With such a short development cycle, it’s really hard to stick\u00a0to a meticulously planned schedule, trust me – I’ve tried it. My plan was literally: “SATURDAY: Music and art in the morning, Code in the afternoon. SUNDAY: Finish it off”. And of course, even that was thrown off following a surprise trip to London.<\/li>\n <\/ol>\n

    The Camera Stack<\/strong><\/p>\n

    Unity comes with a handy layer system which allows specific objects to be \u00a0rendered with specific cameras. Each frame in LOAPB consists of three layers: Sky, Mountains and Background and Main Camera. The Sky is rendered first with orthographic projection, then the Mountains are rendered with a perspective camera (this allows a parallaxing effect), and finally the foreground is rendered with the level and players.<\/p>\n

    \"CameraPreviews\"<\/a><\/p>\n

     <\/p>\n

    The Whole Typing Thing<\/strong><\/p>\n

    So this took wayyyyyy<\/em> more maths than I had ever anticipated but all the code is accessible (DisplayStory.cs and Parser.cs) so I won’t go into too much detail. Here’s a quick topological overview of the system:<\/p>\n

      \n
    1. A lowly text file is parsed, containing a series of sentence fragments, instructions and function calls.\"LowlyTxt\"<\/li>\n
    2. This is passed to the DisplayStory script which processes each sentence fragment and waits for the respective key to be hit.<\/li>\n
    3. When the right key is hit, a text object is instantiated, having \u00a0calculated the position of the text beforehand.<\/li>\n <\/ol>\n

       <\/p>\n

      Sky<\/b><\/p>\n

      The more observant of you may have noticed the sky transitioning to dawn at the beginning of the game. This was a glitch – it was supposed to slowly transition throughout the game. Regardless, it was achieved by changing the y position of\u00a0a long long long sky strip (made with Photoshop gradients and a dissolve layer).<\/p>\n

      \"Sky\"<\/a>(this is supposed to be a gif)<\/em><\/p>\n

       <\/p>\n

      Other ‘Interesting’ Points<\/b><\/p>\n