Bullet Time Post-Mortem

What if bullets shot people?

Bullet Time

For our first Ludum Dare entry, we made an isometric physics-based arcade shooter about a bullet seeking revenge for spent cartridges everywhere… by launching ragdoll people out of a bazooka at men in suits.

What Went Right

guns don’t kill people, bullets kill people

Bullet Willy –

One of our biggest successes was the design of our main character Bullet Willy. His cigar has smoke coming off of the end and his bandana waves in the wind as he totters around spouting one-liners.

Humor –

From Willy and his quips to the mayhem of piled bloody bodies to the overused screams, we think the game turned out pretty funny.

The blood particle system –

Watching blood fly everywhere from both your enemies and your ammo is remarkably satisfying. We even based our scoring system around the blood particle system (btw, the high score in our dev team is 4.8 million drops of blood spilled, so have fun trying to top that).

blood particles, blood particles everywhere

What Went Wrong

The blood particle system –

About that high score… the only reason he didn’t go higher is because the game crashed due to those 4.8 million blood particles. On our initial release, the game had a lot of trouble keeping a decent frame-rate. After fixing a bug which caused multiple particle sprayers to instantiate in the same place, the game is far more playable now, but there can still be framerate issues in the late game and 4.8 million is probably going to be a permanent high score now that there’s a lot less blood.

The lighting –

Another major framerate issue was due to the lighting. We wanted to have a lot of point lights scattered around the ceiling of the office, but when we did, the game was basically unrunnable. We probably could have fixed this, but due to our inexperience with Unity, we ended up cutting out most of the lighting effects in the final hour.

Visibility –

It can be a little hard to see what the hell is happening. The power-up boxes are hard to read, the enemies’ suits match the carpets, and, oh yeah, there’s blood everywhere.

Conclusion

We are extremely happy with our project. Originally, our goal for Ludum Dare was just to finish a working game that would run. We accomplished that goal and more, and have had a great time participating in our first Ludum Dare! Hopefully, we’ll see you all again next time!

Click here to play Bullet Time!