Hi,

I thought I would force my thoughts on how my first Ludum Dare went on you all.

I created ‘The Tater Conspiracy’ which is a first person treasure hunt game and my first jam game completed solo. You can play my game on my LD page here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=14993

Theme: I was honestly suprised at the theme when it was announced. I am a 3D artist so I was concerned that the theme would be very programmer-centric (like weird physics). Instead we got ‘minimalism’ which is an incredibly broad theme but one that suited me well enough.

Ideas: I really only came up with two ideas: one was a Rez-esque racing game the other was the treasure hunt I ended up making. The reason I chose the treasure hunt was so I could try out some mechanics that I hadn’t done before that would help me in future game projects I have planned.

Programming: I am not a programmer, I have played around with Game Maker and Action Script but I do not know how to write code for Unity (my engine of choice). Not too long ago I discovered Playmaker; an add on to Unity that allows code illiterates such as myself to create state machines visually. This was the first time I have attempted something of this scale with Playmaker and it performed beautifully. The game mechanics revolving around picking up and dropping items was fairly easy to implement and debug when I encountered them.

Art: Art was constructed in my 3D Package of choice. To save time models were not textured just assigned a colour value. Lighting was switched to a linear workflow and was baked in to give the game a soft natural look. Unfortunately Baking takes for ever and I had little time to optimize it for the best effect.

Problems: My game was over-scoped, too many unique mechanics. I had planned to enter TTC into the main compo but since I was out most of the first day I had to push for the Jam instead.

Baking takes forever! And because of that when I had to make some level changes to fix an error I ended up with some weird lighting on one of the fences.

My maze was unwinnable. I had accidentally put a wall that cut my maze in two! I only found this out after several people had played my game and got stuck. I have since fixed this but it meant several hours of reuploading (because the files are pretty big and my connection sucks).

This was a wonderful experience and was a great test of what I am capable of and what Unity and Playmaker are capable of.

The Tater Conspiracy can be played Here

Thanks for reading!

-Korda