Flail Rider [Postmortem]

About Ludum Dare

Okay! It’s time for me to write some kind of a postmortem about Ludum Dare! I am not really used to writing stuff online, but when making Flail Rider I made surprisingly many posts about it! Content wise they were kinda bad though, since they were mostly gifs and screenshots. Anyways, firstly, I want to say to everyone who has never ever taken part in Ludum Dare before to TRY it soon as possible! Seriously, participate in it, or in any other game jam really! It was hugely rewarding experience for me and I got to push my limits and see what I can do in such a short time period. Go participate in it!!! You shouldn’t go into it thinking you are going to make the best game ever, since most probably you are not. Even if you fail horribly you are going to learn something from it! I decided to just focus on making a game that is fun to play – a game I would enjoy playing – and then everything started falling into place! I’ve known about Ludum Dare for some years now, but never participated in it before. I’m really glad I did this time and now I understand that it’s really fun and rewarding. 😀

Flail Rider

When I saw the tweet with the theme “An unconventional weapon”, I became a bit annoyed since it wasn’t any of my favourites. (I liked the theme “You are the power source” the most!) After reading the tweet I started brainstorming ideas. This lasted for about 1 hour and I didn’t come up with anything really interesting and felt frustrated. I then came up with an idea of a top-down car game. Since I was working alone, making a top-down game with a tiny car would save me a lot of time, since I have less stuff to animate, in fact there’s no animations in the car in Flail Rider, just couple of particle effects! :)

I didn’t like my initial idea, but I decided to start working on it since I had no better ones. The idea was about dragging your mouse around the screen – a car would follow it while shooting flames from behind.. It was about driving in circles and burning zombies to ashes with the flames – while evading crashing on rocks etc. At this point I still didn’t feel good about the whole game jam!! – but I was ready to accept the challenge and do my best though, especially since I skipped my uni classes that day, I didn’t want to waste the time trying to think of the perfect idea. My new schedule has classes on Saturday morning, for 4 hours!! How horrible!! :( I then worked on the idea for about 4-5 hours, trying to get the particle system working properly, without success. I felt really frustrated since I already got stuck in the beginning and was wasting a lot of time. That afternoon my girlfriend surprised me by ordering me Javanese coffee and delicious Asian food. <3 While eating I cleared my thoughts and shared my dissatisfaction about the idea.

Change of plans

I decided to scrap the flame particle idea, I also didn’t feel like doing anything which has zombies in it. Since I already had the basic car mechanic written, I thought of some ideas I could replace the particles with, and came up with a flail! Most of my time on the first day I spent getting to understand the joint physics of Unity, it took some time to get it work without the flail glitching and flipping out like crazy! 😀

I got surprisingly lot done in the first day. I made some basic models in blender, like the car, trees, one building and the flail. Really simple low poly stuff! I had some basic mechanics done, like the mechanics for building explosions and game over state when you drive towards an object or hit yourself with the flail. Firstly I wanted the flail to kill the player if not handling it carefully. After some feedback from my friends I though it was too difficult and not that fun to play. That was actually the main ‘unconventionality” of the flail, the fact that it will also destroy the player. The game was shaping up nicely!

On the second day I created the score system and the power ups! Now when collecting a power up, your car would become invincible for a short time making you able to bash through everything, and it felt super satisfying. 😀 I wasted a lot of time just driving around and destroying things. It felt good! I also made blog posts about my progress and a short gameplay video showcasing the power ups!

On the third day I focused on polishing the game and making it feel good to play, I got really nice music from my friend who goes by the name @thiefinger in twitter. He doesn’t have any game music in online, but let me say he can produce really amazing stuff for games, just ask him!!!! :) Listen to the song for Flail Rider for example!

I made a cute title screen by being creative with the couple assets I had done in blender, made a credits screen, implemented a local highscore system, polished a bit more, my friend suggested making the car flash while on power up mode! I tried it and it was a perfect! :) On the night of the last day I implemented the support for xbox360 controller. At this time I felt like Flail Rider was starting to be ready for submitting. I did a last bug hunt with my friend and he helped me to test the game with a controller. Then it was time to submit! After that I made a final blog post and crashed to bed (it was 6am), slept for 3 hours and went to my university feeling like a zombie! Next couple days I felt really tired but also really happy! 😀

Last thoughts

I hope this blog post will inspire people who has never participated, to take part in Ludum Dare or in any other game jam. It’s really fun and rewarding, I’m sure you will learn many new things about game development and about what you are able to create! If your game happens to become really interesting and fun, maybe you can turn it to a full game! I’m surely planning to continue working on Flail Rider, it was born from hours of frustration, to a game I really enjoy to play! :) Lastly, sorry for my grammar, I’m too tired to read through all this now!!

If you haven’t yet, you can check out Flail Rider here!

ps. While writing this post, I suggested my friend to create a Soundcloud account for his game music stuff, well he did! Don’t feel shy to contact him! :)