POSTMORTEM: First Person Boomerang Puzzle Game

Original post made on my blog at www.acheronstudio.com

I’ll start by saying the experience of doing this game jam was absolutely incredible. I can’t believe the value and amount of learning that took place in just 48 hours. I’ll share my experience prior to the jam, the tools I used, the time I spent, my thought process, things that were challenging, things I wanted to do but didn’t have time, things I learned and things I would do for next time.

RETRIEVAL – a First Person Boomerang Puzzle Game

Play my game:
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-28/?action=preview&uid=29328

Me:

Adam Tea
23 years old
Computer Science background
2+ years experience working as a game dev (mainly flash/java, and just more recently Unity)
I like C# and XNA, but recently switched to Unity, and wish I did sooner

Tools:

Unity Pro (I have a license thanks to my employer)
Unity Asset Store (resources)
Got my free boomerang model from tf3dm.com
Photoshop (though I didn’t use it at all for this submission)

What went down:

I live in Auckland, New Zealand, and as most people know, we live in the future. Literally. We see the new sun rise before anybody else in the world does. This meant that the start of Ludum Dare and the announcement of the theme happened on Saturday afternoon, at 3PM.

Right before the theme announcement, I made a warmup submission:
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-28-warmup/?action=preview&uid=29328

I made it my absolute goal to, at the very least, submit something for the warmup. I had started work about a week prior to the compo on a generic First Person game where you can walk and click on things to make things happen. This was a crucial base to my participation in the LD compo, as my game was built on its foundation. I’m really happy I took the initiative to do this, as it was an important first step.

Once the theme was announced and the competition started, I literally closed my development environment and stopped working. Instead, what I did was make a call to my sweetheart. My fiancee, despite being in a completely different field, is wholly supportive of my work. So we started talking and throwing around ideas. We came up with some good ones, but I was still a little apprehensive about implementing most of them, as they felt like they would be a little time consuming. One idea I really liked was One Light Source, a torch with diminishing batteries, or a candle light which you had to be careful to keep lit. Lights are easy in Unity :)

I spent the rest of the night busy being out. I was still constantly thinking of what to make however.

Sunday morning came around, and I cracked into it. I practically spent the whole day working on my submission, still unsure of what to do for the theme when I started. I started with making generic additions:

• Teleporters
• Buttons you could press
• Buttons you could step on
• Geometry – stairs, bridges, etc.

Some of these took a while. Interacting with something to get something ELSE to move or do something took more time than I thought it would. I thought I had a great robust interaction system already in place. Boy was I wrong. Guess you never know how good (or bad) your system really is until you really put it to test.

Sometime after this, I thought of it. A boomerang! I had no idea where it came from, but it came. Ideas for mechanics and puzzles came to mind.

• You only had one projectile (boomerang)
• You could use the projectile to hit buttons and switches, the catch being you had to retrieve it once you threw it (you only got one, after all)
• It could act as a light source. Throw it to illuminate your path, or hold onto it to light your surroundings.
• …and I knew more puzzles ideas would come. I trusted the idea!

More did come, but alas I had no time to implement them. But, the potential was there. I knew that everything I couldn’t get done for the compo, I could do after.

So, with my trusty idea in hand, I began by looking for a 3D model on the internet for a boomerang. After that, I spent so long on just getting it to throw, getting it to pick up, getting it to retrieve, getting it to stick to walls, getting it to… basically, just work as expected! Nothing fancy, just what you’d expect of it. I was getting a little demoralized at this point, but I soldiered on. The most difficult and time consuming thing to do was to get the boomerang to work with the buttons. “They’re already working”, I thought, “they just need to work with the boomerang now”.

Hours went by.

Finally I got everything to work OK. There were still some bugs, still some oddities. But I had no choice but to accept that what I had would have to be good enough. The day ended at 1AM.

Monday was work! I thought I’d have to finish up at work and then just submit it. Thankfully I was able to pump in about an hour at work, around lunch time. This time was spent making the small amount of puzzles in the game. That was the bridge, the spiral staircase, and the raising gate. I spent a bit more time after that just submitting it. There was a super mini play test that some of my coworkers did, which was nice. I recall fixing some minor bugs and adding some trivial details that came from feedback. Overall good stuff.

I had submitted my first Ludum Dare!

Things that didn’t quite make it.

As I mentioned, a ton of ideas flooded in as I was making the game. Ideas that never made the submission. Ideas I was excited to explore. Ideas such as:

• Batman Arkham style first person boomerang control
• Slowing down time (throw your boomerang, and while it’s slowed, you could follow it)
• Zones you could / couldn’t enter only with / without your boomerang
• Using it as a stepping stone
• Gravity switching
• Magnetism: the boomerang could gravitate towards certain magnetised objects (holding onto it would magnetise you too!)
• Light it up with fire, throw it to burn things.
• Electrify it, throw it to electrify things / power up machinery.
• Metroid style unlocks (such as finding illumination, the power to send it back to you, the power to control it mid-air, etc).
• …and tons more.

Ok, so it seems like I’m feature creeping it. I don’t feel like I am, though. These are ideas worth exploring. I’ll try things out and see how they work. Keep the best ones, toss the lame ones. I’m just damn excited that there’s an abundance of these ideas, cause it means that there’s a ton of potential. I might stumble upon something that isn’t any of these ideas, but I might come across them by trying to explore these ideas. So these mark an incredible starting point.

Other general points would be to fine tune the controls. The submission had terrible buggy controls. Tightening them up would be a given. The amount of content: levels + puzzles, were also sorely lacking. I simply need to make more!

Things I learned

So, there are several different categories that games are rated against for Ludum Dare submissions:

• Overall
• Innovation
• Fun
• Theme
• Graphics
• Audio
• Humor
• Mood

I’ve realised that to get a good overall submission, you’re going to want to get high scores in all of these categories. So anyway, here’s my list:

• Don’t forget about graphics and audio. My submission had NO audio, which automatically gets me a N/A, or 1 star for Audio. That’s a significant hit to my overall score. The same went with graphics. Though my “art style” was intentional minimalistic, you can still do things to make it look nice. Next time, I’ll pay more attention to these two categories.
• Don’t try to tackle something that’s too big. Try to plan ahead, and go for the lowest hanging fruit. I wanted my game to have something like 16 puzzles. I ended up with only 3, and they weren’t 3 amazing ones. They were just 3 simple ones. If you focus small from the get go, you can at least put all your effort into making it great.
• Try new things, but only those that are close to the skills you’re comfortable with. You might feel like these game jams are an opportunity to learn something new you’ve never done before, and you’d be right, but doing so means you most likely won’t get a game out in time. I felt like I had spent a long time just getting the boomerang to throw and latch onto objects without causing issues. Don’t get me a wrong, it was a fantastic learning experience! And I don’t regret going ahead with it. But you should keep in mind that attempting something that is even basic might take you a significant amount of time if you’ve never done anything like it before.
• Be prepared, and plan! I already took steps to prepare myself by submitting a warm up game, which acted as a base for my submission. I can’t emphasise this enough: this was key! Next time I’d like to be even MORE prepared. This kind of thing extends with your experience level, so the better you get at coding games in Unity and the more time you spend making games, that more prepared you’ll be for a game jam. As for planning, I almost did no planning at all. This was due to being caught up with getting the basic game running. If I had gone into puzzle creation mode, then planning would have gone a long way, but I never really quite got there, and when I did I was running out of time. When it comes to designing levels or puzzles though, planning is a must. Spend some time away from the computer.
• Immerse yourself in the community. Blogging, twitter, facebook, tell your friends, your family, see what others are saying, check out other people’s submissions, and so on. Be a part of the running conversation.
• Play and rate as many games as much as you can, and EARLY.
• … DO these game jams! You learn so much from them, seriously! The worst thing for an ambitious game dev would be NOT to participate!

Conclusion

As you can tell, participating in a game jam is an INCREDIBLE experience. To anybody that has read this post and come this far, I hope this post was interesting or helpful in at least one way or another.

To all that participated, you guys did awesome! See you all at the next one!

-Adam Tea

www.AcheronStudio.com
www.twitter.com/AcheronStudio