I waited a couple of days to write this to let my head clear and I’m not sure it is, so I’m just going to write it

This was a brutal LD for me. I slept 6 hours throughout the whole thing (1pm till about 7pm). I was up sat night from 7pm until close of LD submission. I clocked my time and I put in nearly 40 hours on this game and my second Twitch stream is nearly 24 hours! I was basically underwater most of the time and had too much to do so I was virtually never away from the computer. Whew. Don’t try this at home.

The unfriendly Underdeep.

What went right…

• Streaming. I decided to try to stream the whole process. It had good and bad associated with it, but I think it was a good experience overall. I had some dev friends watching and providing support. Some watchers posted some great ideas and it was fun to provide a peek at developing the game.
• Building on experience from 3 past Ludum Dare’s. I never could have done this as my first game.
• I finished and the game feels solid, controls well and is technically competent, due to Unity. I was able to make 16×16 pixel art look sexier with nice fog effects.
• I barely finished, and had it not been for doing 3 LD’s before and being as comfortable with the tools as I was, I would not have…and that said…I almost didn’t finish…

What went wrong…

• I over reached in terms of scope, but dammit, I wanted to make an FPS and a 3D game and make the leap from 2D. I knew it was going to be very difficult, and it was.
• Streaming. I hadn’t streamed before, so I had setup and technical issues. I spent the first 2.5 hours of the compo trying to get to steam on OSX (which has terrible options). I finally broke down and purcahsed Wirecast (which is not cheap) so I could do it well, then had lots of setup issues. As it was, there were still audio issues. So as usual, make SURE you have all your tech setup before hand…and not just tools/base code.
• I struggled with Unity a lot. I hadn’t really done enough work in 3D and had some issues moving things around, even though it turns out it’s trivial. I had some issues with my billboarding script messing with Unity moving things, and wasted lots of debug time. In short I spent 90% of my time implementing things and struggling, vs polishing and tweaking and getting to gameplay. As such the game is there but it’s pretty lite.
• I was displeased with the “AI” and it wasn’t working well. This was 5:30pm a couple hours before submission…and I started to re-write it, after being up since 6pm the previous night. Oh boy…it nearly fell apart. My head was too fuzzy to think. I was streaming and felt added pressure there to perform and the wheels were coming off. Literally a half hour before deadline I snagged some code from the Unity forums and just pushed guys around randomly with physics impulses and that seemed “ok” and avoided some of the other issues I was having (need to revisit a better way to billboard sprites that doesn’t mess with LookAt headings etc). But I was very seriously facing missing the deadline. My pulse was racing, my heart was beating, I ignored the stream for like an hour. I pushed the cat off my desk. I don’t have panic attacks but I imagine this was what one felt like.
• Massive sessions. The final was literally 26 hours at my computer with only a few 15 min breaks for food/restroom/clear head etc. That’s WAY too much, but it had to be done. I wanted to finish. I didn’t want to fail. I had streamers watching. Sacrifice the body I’ve done crunch mode in the game industry many times before, but this was more painful. Maybe it’s because I’m older now and not 30 anymore
• I was so rushed at the end that the sounds are complete throwaway and I’m disappointed there. No ambient cave/dungeon track, etc.

So, this was a beast of a project for me, but I leveled up a lot and could do a much better fps in less time next time (which I might). On one hand you want to reduce scope to increase chance of success but on the other hand, sometimes you just gotta say “f*ck it” and reach higher than your ability and see what happens

Hope you enjoy the game. Please rate it and comment and I will do the same in return.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 19th, 2013 at 11:55 am and is filed under LD #28. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.