Inquisitor’s Note: Under interrogation, the insurgent “dustystylus” was deemed to have screamed the following:

Original plans

When the topic was announced, I thought about some recent uprisings in the world where communications were monitored and thought about a game where you don’t know where the enemy is and have to decode their signals to find them.

Aesthetically, I’m a fan of all things Russian, so I wanted to have a vaguely eastern look and feel the game. The name Victor Grozny is a play on Ivan Grozny, who we know in the west better as Ivan the Terrible.

What went right:-
– Unity. This was my first time using Unity 3D and it turned out to be a great choice.
– Unity… let’s you get away with some atrocious coding and scripting hacks… which is exactly what you need when you’re under pressure to just get stuff working.
– Music. This is one of the bits of the 48hr game making process that I like the most. It’s nice to take a break from the code to play around with musical ideas, I find it refreshes the brain a little bit for when you head back into the code again.
– FX. Heehee, I was going to record my own voice for the radio chatter, but had an idea to translate English to Welsh and get Google Translate to ‘talk’ it, and then record that back into Reaper, and then process it with various FX (pitch adjust and transistor distortion). They’re actually quoting from the Magna Carta about the rights of citizens not to be oppressed. ;o)

What went wrong:-

– Fun. Well, a lack of it really. Before posting my entry I asked a friend to take a look at it. “well, it’s not very fun” was the reply and he was right. I almost didn’t post my entry.
– Controls. It was a terrible idea to have the game use click & drag for the 4 knobs. You spend all the time looking at the knobs rather than the map display. It would’ve made more sense to have the mouse control XY and then use either keys or mouse-click-hold for the other controls. Make it feel more ‘interactive’.
– Unity. Well, let me elaborate. I had a panic on the Saturday morning… this was the first time I’d used Unity and was struggling a bit, so I closed Unity and opened up Eclipse with an idea to do a pixel-art game instead. After a couple of hours I went back to Unity again and decided to press ahead with it. Definitely made the right choice but I lost a few hours to that indecision on my part.
– Clash of art styles. The GFX for the Inquisitor, Insurgents and Buildings are pixel art… this is because it was going to be a LWJGL pixel art game (I thought it would save time). Didn’t have time to work on better replacements.

Conclusion

I still like the basic premise of the game and am thinking about developing a much more strategic version. I will definitely use Unity in future. However, I’m going to prepare some foundation LWJGL code so that I have the option to something pixel-art based if the mood so takes me.

Ooh, uploaded a Linux version as well, as you guys don’t have access to the webplayer
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-25/?action=preview&uid=15902