Warning: The Stickman Cometh contains blood and violence, though it’s mostly cartoonish.

What a great weekend!  This is my first time actually completing a Ludum Dare, and I’m glad to have something to show for it at the end.  Not to mention that I learnt a lot more about Unreal Engine, which was my main goal, and I had a lot of fun doing it.  The character animation system in Unreal is just amazing, and I finally got around to playing with Cascade, Unreal’s particle editor (GPU blood splatter!). The game was done entirely in Blueprints, Unreal’s visual scripting system, no C++.

I’m more or less happy with how my game came out.  I have a whole feature list that’s only half crossed off, but at least I have something complete, albeit flawed.  I think the core mechanic is fun though, and that’s what’s important to me.  There’s some key things missing, such as a health meter, so you can’t see how much health you have left.  The bullet time power is currently unlimited, which is also a bit of a problem.   There’s also no way to get more health, which makes it pretty hard to last more than 10-15 seconds each round.  There’s also no score, the game doesn’t keep track of how many enemies you’ve killed.

Here’s something I find interesting though; this wasn’t intentional, but playing it as it is now, with these flaws that would hold obviously it back from being a full game, I got this sense that it was some sort of commentary on war.  Death is almost inevitable, and you don’t really know when it’s coming.  There’s just an endless stream of bad guys, all you can do is shoot them before they shoot you, and pretty soon you lose count.  The slow melancholy music I made for it probably helped give this feeling, but I swear I did not have this is mind while developing it, at least not consciously. I think it’s fascinating that I myself can interpret something I made differently than how I intended it.

I think I’m going to continue to work on it, polish it up, and try to expand it into a full game.  I would love to hear any feedback people have on it. Hope everyone enjoys it.

Now it’s time to play some games.

-Woz