Last Ludum Dare 48 Hour Compo I failed to make enough progress by Saturday afternoon and I retreated. The next day I decided that I would take a look into the game engine Unity that I know a few people in #ludumdare use. It looked pretty neat so I decided that I would use my “Enemies as Weapons” idea as a test game to learn the Unity editor and play around with the scripting.  A month later, not a whole lot of progress was made, but I did end up getting a little used to Unity and it isn’t completely overwhelming anymore. Last weekend I upgraded to 3. 0, took a look at MonoDevelop and liked what I saw. I am in the process of migrating my JavaScript code over to C#, which may be a smidgen more difficult to deal with than JavaScript in some ways but is much more powerful.

The Game

The working title is LoneStranger’s UFO Defense (How original! It will look nice next to LoneStranger’s Caverns, LoneStranger’s Shredder, LoneStranger’s Islands…. and should also not to be confused with XCOM: UFO Defense). It’s a side view, single screen game where you have to defend your people from the invading alien invasion force. Along the way you will use captured and scavenged alien technology to build up better weapons and defenses. I have a little dude that runs back and forth along the bottom, and a random-moving UFO in the sky. The player can shoot non-lethal bullets at the moment.

An early shot of the UFO Defense game.

I’m currently putting together the full gameplay docs, and along with that, the desired feature list. I will then split the list into “must have” and “would be nice” and “maybe sometime in the future” categories. Furthermore, the features in the “must have” category will be ranked based on an implementation order that makes sense. Anything on the “must have” list should be in before the end of the month, and I should really have most of those implemented before working on the “would be nice” list. The lists will be the topic of a future post.

Platform

My target platform is the web using the Unity web player. I know it’s not as widespread as Flash, but it’s what I’m using and that’s what I’m stuck with.

As far as my revenue making strategy, I don’t think I want to bother with any official sites, though that may change. My current plan is to host it on my own website and throw some ads on the page. I am already signed up with Google AdSense, and that is probably what I’ll use unless I do a little research and find something else that pays better. Advertising the game itself might be a challenge and will have to be word of mouth initially. As with some other PoV Challengers, I feel the goal of October is to make the game, not necessarily make the target profit.

Challenges

TV in general is a big time suck. My wife and I recently signed up for Netflix and added a lot of movies to our queue. I’ll probably be drawn to about one or two movies a week, but if I’m disciplined enough on non-movie days, I should be ok. Pandora and my headphones are a great way to focus energy toward the project. Other web things I usually peruse each day might be another timesuck, but again, discipline will be key.

Artwork isn’t a strong point of mine, but I do have a couple friends that draw. They have both told me in the past they won’t hesitate to do things for any games I make. The plan here would be to finalize all artwork sometime in the next week or so and ship them off my sketches and requirements so I can get it all back before the deadline.

Music shouldn’t be a challenge in it’s most simple form, since Wolfram Alpha can make some really fitting backround tunes. However, I would like to take this a step further. More on this in a future post.

The Future

Of course, I should keep at least one blurry eye on the future and make sure that I’m designing something that could be easily ported to another platform. I’d love to do a iOS game if I felt that this was taking off (and it paid for the Unity add-on itself). Things like control scheme and display would have to take this into account.

And….GO!

I already started, but now that I’ve made my first post it really feels like a compo… only longer and with a better goal!

Tags: screenshot