Update 4: Bomb Your House – Post mortem

I completed my first ever Ludum Dare! Yay!!!

I had a lot of fun, and I think my game represents my intial idea, although quite different.

Bomb Your House (LD link)

Gameplay summed up in 2 seconds:

25 minutes of me having fun with the game:

Concept

My initial idea was a game where you first scout an area for places to tag, then create a grafitti stencil, and then perform the grafitti while avoiding guards. The story was going to be political or personal where you take out your revenge for whatever reason.

While programming the placement of the tag and drawing of the stencil itself, I discovered that it was actually much more fun just drawing. So I then came up with an idea where you can draw directly on the revenge target’s car. After some unity hurdles, my drawing mechanic worked!

I then changed my mind about the car and went on creating a bathroom, as I thought it could be fun to just vandalize such a private place. That is when my idea for the story came up: Your family is planning on moving to another place. You are a kid, who doesn’t want to move. So in order to turn down any potential buyers, you draw all over the apartment.

Unity

This is the first time I make a game with Unity, and the second time I ever made a game in 3D. I used Boo as scripting language because I prefer the python like syntax.

The main thing I learned about Unity is that there is always an easy way to do something, it’s just hard to find out how. For example: I wanted the intro pictures to fit on any screen aspect ratio. I googled for a way, but none of the information I found was any useful. So I decided to create my own script for resizing the picture. This lead to several problems as you cannot just set the picture width to the screen width. After a couple of hours (which seemed like an eternity) I finally came up with an solution using the Unity UI system together with the canvas scaler component.

Other than that I had a pretty pleasant first time with Unity and I see myself using it again for future games.

Time

I do programming, modeling, painting and audio. This always leads to an issue where I am not sure which one I should spend the most time on. However I ended up spending close to 50/50 on programming and graphics/audio. Which I think worked out nicely in this case.

If I had another day I would add an outro for the game where you can see the faces of shock. I would also add lots of small necessities for the bathroom, as it is pretty bare minimum at the moment.

Tools

For modeling purposes and UV mapping I used Blender, which is my favorite 3D studio. Photoshop was used for creating textures and intro paintings. I used Audacity for recording marker sounds. Git was used for keeping track of scripts (I am not really sure how to properly use git with Unity projects yet). Sublime Text was used for scripting.

What happens next?

I might develop this game further, adding more rooms which you can vandalize. Ipads, macs, fridge, etc. I think it could be a lot of fun. I would also like to take some time to fine tune the drawing mechanic, as the interpolation doesn’t take UV seams into account which can lead to some glitchy strokes. I would also like to support stroke interpolation between two objects, which I have not thought about a solution for yet.

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Bomb Your House (LD link)