{"author_name":"Beanalby","cat":"LD #23","comments":[],"epoch":1335324060,"likes":0,"metadata":{"p_key":"56017","p_author":"Beanalby","p_authorkey":"11055","p_urlkey":"91737","p_title":"Ludum Dare 23: Post Mortem","p_cat":"LD #23","p_event":"LD23","p_time":"1335324060","p_likes":"0","p_comments":"0","p_status":"UPD5","us_key":"11055","us_name":"Beanalby","us_username":"beanalby","event_start":"1334880000","event_key":"10","event_name":"LD23"},"text":"<p>Now that the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ludumdare.com\/compo\/ludum-dare-23\/\">Ludum Dare competition<\/a> is complete and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ludumdare.com\/compo\/ludum-dare-23\/?action=preview&amp;uid=11055\">my entry<\/a> has been submitted for voting, it&#8217;s time to look back on what worked &amp; what didn&#8217;t.<\/p>\n <h2>The Good<\/h2>\n <ul>\n <li>\n <h3>She handles like a lethargic sloth on narcotics<\/h3>\n <p>I was very happy with the control &amp; &#8220;feel&#8221; of the planets, which was pretty much the only goal I had set out for myself at the start of the competition.<\/p>\n <p>In the game, you&#8217;re controling a tiny ball on a fixed screen that has horrid accelleration &amp; low top speed.  However, the combination of the buildings on the planet to give scale and the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=6esdVydnnSI\">parallax scrolling background<\/a> to imply the motion of hurtling through space gave enough sense of weight to the planet to make the control feel natural rather than sluggish.<\/p>\n <\/li>\n <li>\n <h3>Strike a pose<\/h3>\n <p>This was the first time I&#8217;d modelled anything in blender (besides the square card for &#8220;pick a card&#8221;), and I was very happy with how the buildings turned out.  I was able to get the angles right on all the duplicate buildings so they&#8217;re &#8220;sprouting&#8221; out just like I wanted.  It&#8217;s a special kind of awesome when you envision something in your mind, and are able to produce <i>exactly<\/i> that.<\/p>\n <li>\n <h3>To pew, or not to pew<\/h3>\n <p>It&#8217;s small in the long run, but the screen where you choose which planet you want had quite a bit of thought put into it, and I&#8217;m very happy with it.<\/p>\n <ul>\n <li><i>How do we let users know that clicking on the planets can have an effect?<\/i>  Moving your mouse cursor over either planet zooms them slightly, giving an indication that further interaction with the mouse may be possible.<\/li>\n <li><i>How do we let users know clicking had an effect?<\/i> One thing I definitely DIDN&#8217;T want to do is have clicking on a planet confirm that choice, and move on to the game.  Users often click to see what happens, and taking that as their choice can move things along before they&#8217;re ready.<br \/>\n We still want to let them know clicking has an effect, though.  This was done by adding a yellow &#8220;halo&#8221; effect to the planet that was clicked, letting them know that it&#8217;s the &#8220;active&#8221; selection.<\/li>\n <\/ul>\n <p>One of my goals as a UI designer at work is to make hints for direction subtle enough that users don&#8217;t even realize they&#8217;re there; I think this choice screen worked along those lines.<\/li>\n <\/ul>\n <h2>The Bad<\/h2>\n <ul>\n <li>\n <h3>Texturing<\/h3>\n <p>While the modelling of Mechania was passable, Conflagus looks <i>awful<\/i>.  I was attempting to add swirling clouds similar to Jupiter, but instead it looks like someone smeared Elmer&#8217;s glue on a superball.  I had planned on adding some modelling detail to the planet like Mechania, but I ran out of time.<\/p>\n <p>Part of this was the constraints of the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ludumdare.com\/compo\/rules\/\">Ludum Dare Rules<\/a>.  Everything  has to be made from scratch by the participant &#8211; models, textures, etc.  Normally I would&#8217;ve just grabbed a planet texture from somewhere, but that wouldn&#8217;t fly here.<\/p>\n <p>This is an explanation, not an excuse.  While I&#8217;m skilled at GIMP with content editing, I&#8217;m horrid at content <i>creation<\/i>.  I just can&#8217;t create textures from scratch, and really need to work on it.<\/p>\n <\/li>\n <li>\n <h3>Music<\/h3>\n <p>do-do-DOO-do-do-DOO-do-do-DOO-do-do-DOO-do-DOO-do<\/p>\n <p>do-do-DOO-do-do-DOO-do-do-DOO-do-do-DOO-do-DOO-do<\/p>\n <p>do-do-DOO-do-do-DOO-do-do-DOO-do-do-DOO-do-DOO-do<\/p>\n <p>Yeeaaah.  Sorry about that.<\/p>\n <p>I knew I wanted to get music in the game, and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.drpetter.se\/project_musagi.html\">Musagi<\/a> certainly LOOKED easy to use.  It wasn&#8217;t.<\/p>\n <p>After 30 minutes of fiddling (and with 1 hour until submission deadline), That bassline and simple drumbeat were all I had managed to squeak out.  I do believe I&#8217;m capable of creating much higher quality music, but in the future I&#8217;ll familiarize myself with tools long before-hand.<\/p>\n <\/li>\n <li>\n <h3>Pace<\/h3>\n <p>I had the time per stage set extremely low during development, so I could easily test getting to the later levels without taking a long time (with hours before submission, taking 3 minutes to play through to stage 5 adds up FAST).<\/p>\n <p>I lenghented the stages some, but the final release definitely didn&#8217;t have stages as long as I had intendted.  It turns out it&#8217;s not even possible to lose during the first few stages because so few meteors actually make it to Bulbous during the allotted time.<\/p>\n <\/li>\n <\/ul>\n <h2>Other Thoughts<\/h2>\n <ul>\n <li>\n <h3>Time Management<\/h3>\n <p>Time management is a common sticking point in these crunch competitions, but I think went well for me.  Often people bang away for 48 hours and end up with a very nice game engine and level editor &#8211; and nothing else.  For the final 8 hours, I continually asked myself, &#8220;what do I absolutely, positively need to have in the game that I haven&#8217;t implemented yet?&#8221;<\/p>\n <p>This led me to delay some things I really wanted to try but weren&#8217;t absolutely critical (new model for Conflagus) and implement things that I HAD to have (title screen, multiple levels, health\/progress bar, etc).  As much as I lament not revisiting Conflagus, I&#8217;m glad I didn&#8217;t.  It turns out I I DIDN&#8217;T have time to do all of the above, and I couldn&#8217;t imagine sacrificing any of the later for the former.<\/p>\n <\/li>\n <li>\n <h3>Tools &amp; Tribulations<\/h3>\n <p>This is still a learning process for me.  I&#8217;ve gained a lot of knowledge from my previous <a href=\"http:\/\/home.beanalby.net\/games\/\">forays in Unity<\/a>, and this weekend I spent less time trying to figure out how to use the tools and more time on actual content than previously, but I still ended up spending quite a while figuring out just how to make things worked.<\/p>\n <p>I had a number of false starts.  For example, I tried doing the health bars via:<\/p>\n <ul>\n <li><a href=\"http:\/\/unity3d.com\/support\/documentation\/Components\/class-LineRenderer.html\">Line Renderers<\/a>, but the longer &#8220;background&#8221; lineRenderer always draw on top, and pulling one out in front with a Z depth caused noticable skewing in the sizes\/positions.<\/li>\n <li>Then I tried a <a href=\"http:\/\/unity3d.com\/support\/documentation\/Components\/class-GuiTexture.html\">GuiTexture<\/a>-based solution, and gave up on that after a bit of banging my head against the wall (everything&#8217;s specified in coordinates between 0 &amp; 1 instead of actual pixel numbers)<\/li>\n <li>Finally figuring out how to use <a href=\"http:\/\/unity3d.com\/support\/documentation\/ScriptReference\/GUI.DrawTexture.html\">GUI.DrawTexture<\/a> successfully.<\/li>\n <\/ul>\n <p>All told, I probably spent about 2 hours futzing with something that, if I had to do again now, I could accomplish in about 10 minutes.<\/p>\n <p>That&#8217;s is how it works, though.  I&#8217;d preveiously spent most of a day playing with &amp; tweaking &#8220;click selection&#8221; with my <a href=\"http:\/\/home.beanalby.net\/games\/2\/\">RayCast Selection<\/a> project; for Ludum Dare, I implemented it quick &amp; without a second thought.  Raycast Selection had been a tool in my belt before Ludum Dare, now GUI Textures sit beside it.  My toolkit will continue to grow as I gain experience, which is exactly what I wanted to get from Ludum Dare.<\/p>\n <hr \/>\n <p>It was definitely a fun learning experience overall.  I&#8217;m going to keep cranking out tiny, stupid game concepts in the meantime, and I look forward to participating in future Ludum Dare competitions. \ud83d\ude00<\/p>","time":"April 24th, 2012 10:21 pm","title":"Ludum Dare 23: Post Mortem"}