Hey,

I wasn’t able to do much since christmas was so near, but I managed to polished my tutorial level. It would give the “general vibe” on what the full game will be, so if you did not try it yet, please visit my entry !

Now, for those interested by the story, it is indeed about Light and Darkness, and a psychological tale about finding one self true meaning in life.  I didn’t wanted to let the player lose interest from the main puzzle path of my level, so I made a clear tutorial and a fairly simple level to complete, but for those who wants to know more about the lore and the universe, I hid a secret room with more some story development, where I treated it like “a reward”. This secret room will flesh the character’s backstory and constitute a “truth”, where it is completely possible for one player to miss it if he doesn’t search enough and will receive a different ending if he succeeds. But, the main story/path is a whole story in itself, so the “truths” are backstory, where it’s still completely optional story wise.

The good

It was the first Ludum dare where I used actual dialogues and cutscenes in order to tell a story. Of course, the player has to solve puzzle and make actions to survive, but I had fun to include some dialogues when the player was triggering some objects in the environnement.

I also prepared myself a lot before the LD, so I could set myself a limit for the amount of things I had to do. For example, I knew that I wanted to work with dynamic Lights and Dialogues, so I prepared in advances some plugins so it could be ready when the theme would be revealed.

The Bad

I still have some difficulty with my scene management and how to structure my game. I had to do external research in order to make a game state and a scene manager and how to mix both of them together in Unity. It was really a good learning experience, but I wish I just had more time to learn how to do so. Now, I will save those research as external plugings, so if I want to use them again, I will just need to export them 😉

I had also time management problems, where personal life had to take over LD time, so that didn’t went well for a time. Next time I will try to reserve myself more time, and will probably do something simpler.

Unity Unity Unity…why do you make my life so hard sometime… sometime, I wonder if the engine is made for short LD projects. I had a lot of technical problems this time around, so I wonder if I should use next time something more simple, like Construct 2 or another game making engine.

Managing Dynamic Light has been difficult, since I was dealing with a third party plugin and had to learn how to make it work last minute. I was placing a light between 2 obstacles, so the light would collide with those. Sometime, when moving out from this light with the camera, it didn’t took into account the collision and the light was going through the walls. So I’ve made a little research and found the problem and fixed it, but it cost me a lot of production time… now that I know how it works, I won’t have this issue next time around 😉

To Conclude 

It was a very good LD that gave me a good perspective of what type of game I could do next time. I wanted to add more levels in the end, but that will be for the full game. So have a good time searching for the “truth” and completing this short experience I made for this LD.

Thank you for playing !