It’s done. Well, not done done, but it’s as done as it was going to get this weekend. SIBS that is.
We usually gravitate heavily towards high-octane action platformers, and have a lot of base code and resources for such games. However, just like the last Ludum Dare we entered, we decided to push ourselves outside of our comfort zones, and make something different. SIBS was to be a fairly slow-paced arcade game, with some light strategy elements, but due to time constraints and lack of planning, a lot of what we wanted to get into the game never quite got there.
The biggest bummer was the guard AI. I simply did not have time to write robust enough path finding to allow them to follow the player into the tunnels, and didn’t want to rush a half-assed version. Another was player controls. We only wanted the digging movement to be the choppy kind of stagger that is currently in the game, but, again, I didn’t have time to write something that would’ve allowed the player to move more unimpeded through air, while constraining the character to the grid, needed for my digging implementation. So far, these two points have been raised by most commenters as areas of improvement as well. Both of these are clearly due to me focusing too much on the wrong things early on (optimization, visual effects).
That being said, those things that focus was shifted to, clearly worked very well. Most of the praise we’ve received is for the awesome music Ville wrote, and for the look of the game.
I think what this LD has taught us most of all, is that our weak points as a team are clearly time management and planning and pacing tasks. It’s awesome to figure these things out, because that helps us improve both as a team and as individuals. None of us had the time to work on the game throughout the whole jam, but blaming the games shortcomings on that would be a huge cop-out, as there are tons of very polished entries in the compo category by people who had barely a fifth of the man hours that we had at our disposal.
But alas, it was really fun and educational. We learned a lot, got a bunch of new tools in our bag of tricks, and have a game prototype to polish and turn into something finished.
I would personally like to thank my two teammates for their patience and resolve, I could never do this (game development as a whole, let alone something like Ludum Dare) without the two of you, and thanks to your hard work and our mutual support, I’m working every day towards realizing my dreams! Also thanks to everyone that took part in LD29, it was awesome, as usual!
/Aapo
