NOT THE ELEPHANT – NOT THE POSTMORTEM

Even though this was my first LD, it was far from my first game jam. Making terrible games in 2 hours over at GloriousTrainwrecks.com for their Klik of the Month Klub was great practice for quick decision making in game design. Sure, all my terrible games were made in the ridiculously limited tool from 1994 called “Klik & Play,” but I like to think it taught me to work around limitations and always play to my strengths. NOT THE ELEPHANT was the second game I’ve ever made in Unity, and the first time I’ve returned to Unity since 2010 (which is when I made RHINOCOPTER. Starting to notice a trend…)

What went right: The idea for the game came to me pretty quickly, and it made use of all of the tools I had planned to use (Shapeshop for modeling blobby elephants, Making Waves for beatbox-ish music loops, a certain skybox generator, and Unity to bring it all together.) The requirement that I make all my textures from scratch ended up pushing me to google for photoshop tutorials instead of finished materials, which had an added benefit of teaching me new things in the process. Now I know how to whip up a passable wood texture in seconds flat! Overall it was a great learning experience in multiple disciplines.

What went wrong: The tools I wanted to try out had limitations that I wasn’t aware of when I started the project. Shape Shop 3D is a great tool for quickly sketching out models, but its sticker-like texturing system doesn’t export unwrapped and textured models yet. Which meant that my initial plans to end each level with a painted version of the elephant was right out. And if I had bothered to take a look at the Unity Asset Store, I would have noticed a free cube-fracturing plugin that would have made the game entirely dynamic and saved me a lot of trouble with pre-dicing cubes by hand in my 3D editor. I suppose my manually-fractured cubes gave the game a predictable and linear difficulty curve, but real-time fracturing would have been so much cooler. (oh, wait, Asset Store assets are disallowed, aren’t they. Never mind!)

Just for fun I’ve included the chat transcript where I came up with my entire game design plan only 8 minutes after the theme was announced. Thanks for reading, and see you next time!

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