Although making our game was fun and we definetly achieved a fair amount of content in the time limit. There were a bunch of things that we couldn't do in time. So I thought I'd write a small blog post to show off some of the stuff we very nearly managed to get into the game, but didn't quite make it.

I worked as the sole artist in our group, so this post will mostly be focusing on that side of things.

The first thing is the characters in the game. Although these characters both feature in the game (as main character and boss), there were a lot more plans to use them more thematically, having them talk and interact to build a story for the player to experience as they play through the loops. This was all dropped, and while I don't think the characters are perfect (they could definetly do with a bit of love to make them look better), I'm also sad that you basically only ever see them from one camera angle and I don't thing that does them justice.

The next thing is the environment. We'd built and designed this system to allow us to plug in a variety of rooms and props, allowing each run to feel a bit different. I built a shader in UE4 that allowed me to paint in materials in a semi-realistic way to speed up this process. It worked by using a height map to ensure other materials (sand/water/etc) would more accurate interact with the tiles I built.

You can see me painting using the shader below, notice how the sand fills the cracks between the tiles first.

However, by the time we got to the end, we basically only had time for 3 main rooms to exist (see the picture below) and the time I'd spent allowing myself to quickly paint-up a bunch of rooms for a varied effect ended up being wasted. It was still fun to set up, and something I'll hopefully rework in another jam to use again.

The last thing I want to talk about is VFX. This jam had a lot of content, characters, animations, environment, UI, textures, lighting and VFX, so I was tight on time and couldn't overly focus on one thing. Setting up visual effects is something I enjoy doing and it's something I would love to spend more time doing as I'm not particularly experienced at it. However I did start on a VFX that I thought was cool. You can see it in the gif below. It basically takes the mesh location and spawns a bunch of 'sand' particles on him. The idea was when you died or timed out, you would turn to sand and blow away. Cool idea, never made it into the game. Maybe someday I'll do a VFX heavy game so I can spend more time exploring it.

There are a bunch of other things that we didn't get time to put in, but overall the game turned out pretty good. If you're interested in seeing what we actually submitted check out the link below and be sure to give a comment to let us know your thoughts.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/47/time-raider

-Greg