Her Majesty’s Apathy Bomb postmortem

Firstly, if you haven’t played it, find it here: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-32/?action=preview&uid=44075

I’m very happy with the finished product here. It’s a competition entry, so all content was created by me in the 48 hour timeframe, including all 3d modeling, texturing, narration, etc.

The key didn’t make it into the final version, nor did the MagicaVox cathedral.

My initial concept drew inspiration from The Stanley Parable (branching narrative, responsive and snarky narrator) and the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (weapons that cause apathy). It took me well into Saturday morning to figure out actually what the story was going to be, and even though I only had a barely functioning gameplay engine at that point, I recorded all the narration right away. After that, I cobbled together functional level geometry out of Unity quads blocks, and figured out how the audio trigger zones were going to work and stuck them in. This took the better part of Saturday afternoon. But, once I did that, I felt really good.

This is something that I usually DON’T do while making games – getting the gameplay working before everything else. Usually I’ll spend hours making the world look pretty and making pretty particle effects and then I have no time left to do anything else. So, this was great.

Next, I moved onto some gameplay structure stuff, adding in a main menu, pause menu, and ending scene. After that, I decided that I couldn’t keep my rudimentary level geometry, so I went into Blender and remade the entire palace. This took quite a while, considering I’m not very good at 3d modelling. But, one thing led to another and I figured out that you can just do a smart UV map in blender and then drag textures and materials onto the models in Unity and they’ll map pretty well. This saved me TONS of time that I would’ve otherwise spent making actual UV maps.

The palace, with simple UV mapping

Sunday rolled around, and I spent that:

• making the npcs work
• making trees, terrain, and other environmental details
• figuring out why it was running slowly (lots of fancy water in the distance == slow framerate)
• endlessly tweaking the level geometry and flipping normals to avoid see-through holes in the world
• arranging quads to block light and shadows from going where they shouldn’t
• adding in the unlockable pseudo-achievements at the end for finding different endings

After that, come an hour before the deadline, I started exporting. Everything went pretty smoothly, which is awesome.

And then I’ve spent most of the day today (Monday) enjoying my day off from my day job and playing a bunch of the other entries. There’s some really good stuff this time. Check ’em out: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-32/?action=preview&etype=

Ian (EandE Games)

My animated title screen