Game Description

A puzzle game focusing on level discovery through the use of illumination. Use multiple perspectives to find the path that leads to the goal. While viewing your character from above you can navigate the world and switching to a first person view you can shoot light emitting arrows to light the world around you.

Before the 3 days

Planning:

• Leading up to the final day our team shared our voting results on our Slack message board. We would talk about what we enjoyed and disliked about each theme. Once the final vote was open our team gathered on Skype and discussed the final themes that we enjoyed and disliked. Together we created a list of game ideas for each theme. We stacked up some of the game ideas to cover multiple themes, this allowed us to have fewer game ideas so we could focus on making them more developed.

Once our team had decided that most of our games would be created in 3D, we began researching 3D game development in Unity. During the few hours before the Ludum Dare our team watched videos such as:

• Treehouse: Unity Basics & How to Make a Video Game
• Roll a Ball Tutorial
• Unity: Graphics Tutorials
• Unity: Tanks Tutorial: Camera Controls

Things we had before the start:

• Used the Unity Standard Assets as a base for third person and first person movement controls.
• Also used Unity Game Jam Menu Template as a base for the main menu and level select.

Challenges

• Timing of Ludum Dare wasn’t ideal:
  • Leading up to the event we communicated by Slack instead of having in person meetings. We tried to maximize time we did have available by having agendas for discussions before Ludum Dare, and using Skype to communicate throughout the weekend. We also prioritize letting team members sleep/break when they needed.
  • An example of our timing problems was: our artist had other responsibilities that weekend and had to split their focus on Ludum Dare and their own responsibilities. This was mitigated with the help of coffee, coffee, more coffee, and dogged determination.
• One of level designers did not always have things to work on:
  • Periodic check-ins about what could be done to help teammates were conducted hourly by the team member.
• Time:
  • 3 days is never enough! Comparing to previous projects we found this game was more polished and complete compared to games we had 6 months to work on. Overall we have found that the more games we work on the better we become.
• Theme:
  • The team struggled for inspiration on the selected themes, but with a quick reconstruction of previously created themes we developed an idea that we were both satisfied with and was scoped well for the Ludum Dare. Although the game we wanted to make that was out of scope was: a game in which the player discovers new lands and makes a map of their discoveries everyday. When night approaches the player would sell their maps to gain money to buy upgrades on their explorer gear. We had plans for this game being procedurally generated with a vast amount of places to explore, unfortunately this was out of scope and we decided to go with plan B.
• Unity Scene merging problems:
  • While working on the project our Unity scenes would not merge correctly and required each team member to reimplement anything done in a scene by another member. This was fixed by unignoring meta files and correctly setting the mercurial configuration file on all developer machines. This fix was unable to merge scenes created before the fix, but worked for all scenes created after the fact.

What went right during this Ludum Dare:

• Found free open-source music online to fit the theme, and contacted artist about inclusion into our game. He was excited and posted about the game on Facebook. The music and ambience added to the atmosphere game.
• Several compliments about Mood and Scream in game.
• Visuals reflected a minimalistic style that we enjoyed.
• No one died, everyone ate, we were able to attend to life responsibilities during the weekend as well.
• Camera controls in third person turned out great.
• Modeling a 3D character, rigging and animating in just 5 hours.  We are very proud of the amount of 3D environment props that were created as well.
• Streaming people’s games on Twitch and watching Ludum Dare streamers play our game was very enjoyable for the whole team.
• Lots of great feedback on the game (People loved the scream)
• Female main character.
• The team completed their first 3D game! (Yay artist!)

Things we would like to do differently next Ludum Dare:

• Build a level editor.
• Sleep the night before/take a nap before the theme reveal.
• Request vacation for all three days.
• Not have finals directly prior to the jam.
• Zip files. No installer.
• Release for all platforms upon completion.
• Test levels with someone not on the team.
• Leave more time for visual polish at the end of development.
• Post progress to Ludum Dare during the 3 days we are developing.
• Optimize the game to be smaller than 50MB

Future Plans for “A Shot In The Dark”

• Implement an engaging story
• Create a more open world design similar to Zelda games, where parts of the game are block off based on what powers/upgrades you have unlocked.
• Make levels which use all the implemented features.
• Either remove one of the perspectives, or sync rotation between them.
• Fix the falling bug that allows people to get stuck on the corners
• Add Cat’s Pajama Logo
• Create a compelling UI
• Polish the visual style and the Character animations.
• Reduce the load time when launching game by removing some of the larger sound files.

Credits

• Designers:
  • Paul Schwarzwalder
  • Phoenix Smith
• Programmers:
  • Paul Schwarzwalder
  • Phoenix Smith
• Artist:
  • Lynne Startup
• Level Designers:
  • Jami Schwarzwalder
  • Phoenix Smith

Data Box

​Developer: The Cat’s Pajamas

Publisher: Ludum Dare/Itch.io

Release Date: December 14, 2015

Platforms: Windows and Mac

Game Link: http://thecatspajamas.itch.io/a-shot-in-the-dark

Ludum Dare: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-34/?action=preview&uid=66266

Twitter: @TheCatsPJSGames

Team Size: 4

Length of Development: 3 days

Lines of Code: 1403

Development Tools: Unity 5.2, Visual Studio 2013, 3D Studio Max, Photoshop, Audacity

Asset Resources: Free Music Archive, AudioMicro, freesound.org, YouTube Audio Library