Savior Postmortem

I was pretty happy with my entry for LD32, so I figured I’d write up a more formal postmortem this time; partially because it might be interesting, and partially because I’ve learned a ton from this compo and want to get my thoughts down. So, without further ado, here’s what worked and didn’t work in Savior: On the Advantages of Unconventional Weaponry in Combating the Zombie Apocalypse.

How It Started

I’m not the best programmer and am somewhere between average and solid when it comes to art, so for jams like this one I like to try to come up with a kind of clever gameplay idea that can be interwoven with story (in fact, I just finished my senior thesis on this very subject at university). I think games can be very effective when story and play go hand in hand, informing each other, and I like to play around with that on a small scale for Ludum Dare.

I’ve been sitting on an idea for a game where you play as a scientist curing zombies for quite some time, but never figured out the mechanics of how it would work. With this theme, “an unconventional weapon,” I first wanted to make a sniper-style game where you take pictures instead of shoot people, but I realized I wasn’t familiar enough with the coding I would need to do to make it work. I decided a few hours in to give the idea of saving zombies a go, using a zombie curing serum as a “weapon” that actually helps the zombies. It quickly became a stealth action platformer, and then I was off to the races.

Level 0

How It Changed

My original idea was to do a somber, gritty zombie story. I was going to rotoscope animations in Flash so that my characters would look realistic and the animations would be fully fleshed out. As soon as I finished my first walk cycle it became clear that this wouldn’t be feasible within the time frame; I can animate fast, but not THAT fast, and I’m new to Unity’s animation system anyways. So I took a long break and struggled to come up with a new art style.

The result was this guy: a sort of bean like thing who I grew attached to over to course of the compo.

Some animations in sprite-sheet form for the Player Character

The thing is, this guy looks silly. You can’t tell a gritty zombie story with a bean as your protagonist. So the goals mutated. I started playing up the humor, adding the bloody messages and dopey signs to the backgrounds of levels and trying to entertain myself as I drew. If I could make myself chuckle, maybe I could make other people. I took a lot of inspiration from games like Portal and tried not to take anything I did too seriously. The result, from feedback, seems to have been pretty good!

Stuck with a blank white wall in your level? Write a dumb joke! In blood!

The End

(spoilers after the break – play it now if you don’t want the shocking ending ruined!)

(more…)