LD25 Post-mortem

So I finally finished one! Huzzah!

This time around, I decided to shoot low and add on if I had time. I didn’t like the theme (again) so I had trouble coming up with anything I could do. I ended up with a pretty generic sidescroll shooter that was way too hard. Since ‘way too hard’ was the only thing it had going for it, I let that stay rather than ‘fix’ it.

It worked out really well to get the firing working first, and then work on movement. Then hitpoints and death. Mock up a couple levels and the game works… This was done by about the end of the first day.

I didn’t spend as much time on it the second day as I could have. I was already feeling a bit burnt out, and I had to work today. So I added health bars and finished out the level design, and designated 2 enemies as bosses and gave them more health and a different color. Then I fleshed out the menu systems and level changes, and the ending screen.

Then I went to Disney World. No, literally. lol I needed to get out of the house and regain some sanity. Had this step not been necessary, I would have added pickups for upgrading the gun, and possibly some kind of rocket launcher for some of the enemies, to give them a different weapon.

The graphics bothered me the whole time, but I simply haven’t got the skill to have done anything worthwhile in the time allotted, so I didn’t even try.

My tools let me down a bit. I was trying to use the beta version of a Unity asset, and it screwed up. I was originally going to use it to make the characters, levels, etc, instead of just generic boxes. Would have looked somewhat better, and given me more options for the levels. I tried to remove it and go back to an old version, but I couldn’t remember how to use the old version. lol Oh well.

Other than that, the tools were great. Unity was obviously used for the game, NGUI for the menus and healthbars, and I used Photoshop for the art for the menus/healthbars. I also used SFXR for the gunshot sound. And BMFont with a free font. Since I had used all of those before, there were no surprises and it all went smoothly.

Next time, I think I’ll shoot a bit higher. I’m going to spend more time thinking about the theme and designing the game, and then more time programming as well. I’ll be taking a day off work to make sure I’m not crowded there, either. I think I’ll spend some time these 4 months working on a few things that I didn’t know enough about to implement, like cutscenes and pop-up conversations during the game. I think I’ll also spend time with Blender and Substance Designer and learn to make basic models quickly, and animate them. I think that would have improved the look and feel significantly.