To Fight The Sea Post-Mortem + Timelapse (Ludum Dare 31)

So I finally finished a Ludum Dare without having any issues, and ended up with a game I’m pretty proud of. I worked with Cameron Erickson (art) and Mike LeRoy (music).

PLAY GAME

Slow start

The jam started off for us pretty slow. At first, we had no idea what to make, but I saw a video of a man helping a dead shark give birth to its three babies. I instantly knew that our game should be underwater, and I continued thinking about it. The original idea Cameron and I brainstormed together was to make a game revolving around a similar mechanic to Lost Woods in the original Zelda, minus the screen transition. So you’d wrap around the screen and the rooms would morph slightly and new enemies would spawn. We wanted enemies, bosses, and puzzles. We ended up only being able to fit in enemies and bosses.

Cameron and I continued trying to come up with ideas for enemies, and what the game was even going to be. Cameron worked on the background and character art while I tried getting character movement in. It took me a few hours to get all the math right, and that was about all we got done the first night. However, it already felt smooth and polished. I tried making the code easy to expand and overused the glorious coroutines that are available in the Otter engine.

Day two

I didn’t get a chance to start on Saturday until 3:30 PM, so we were already out a bunch of hours. I had interviewed Florian Himsl (Binding of Isaac) on indie(Radio); Broadcast #50 and that took up a majority of my morning. So we were already pretty far behind, since the jam was nearly 1/3 over at that time and all we had was this jellyfish moving around. The rest of the night consisted of me programming the start of the squid enemy, getting lighting effects working, and learning how surfaces in Otter work. This was one of our major downfalls, that we tried to do a lot of things we didn’t know how to do. Cameron had never done this art style before, and he isn’t experienced with animating (more about this later). I had only tried doing lighting once, and it was awful. The way I was doing certain physics were also different than I had done before, and ended up giving me a lot of trouble at first until I completely wrapped my head around what I was trying to do. Another huge time waster for me was all the special features I added to the lights; you can (in code) specify a series of colors, intensities, and sizes, as well as timespans for each, and the light will loop through these. It is used a little bit, but there were features that weren’t used that could have saved me programming time had I not gotten carried away. We had a lot more effects we had originally planned on putting in the game, but ended up not adding them because everything little thing takes a lot of time when you put it all together. I also should have brushed up on vector maths before the jam, because I’m a bit rusty with them. Before I went to sleep, I hit a friend of mine, Mike LeRoy, and left him a build, asking if he’d be interested in making some tunes for us.

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