USB Hero Post Mortem

Play USB Hero

Ludum Dare is ending, but our work on the game continues (or really just begun). It was fun and engaging experience. It all started with the offer of our teacher to take part in a gamejam…

To begin with, we all are students, but we don’t even studying game development. So, we just got acquainted in a social network and decided to gather and decide what game we will be creating when we would know the theme.

Nevertheless, we met Friday night to determine who’s doing what, and to think up some ideas on the 20 leading themes.

There were a lot of crazy stuff during brainstorm (as with everyone else of course =)), such as: censer as an Unconventional Weapon, mold as Abandoned, a man who adds different parts of bodies to himself in order to Adapt to Survive, handicapped people as Companions, different unpredicted events/actions on different keyboard buttons as Discovery, to find a true Edge of the World in the world of the edges, and avoid Harvesting as a wheat.

Satisfied with several of the ideas we went home. Some of us impatiently waited the announcement of the theme whole night. It was a bit surprising theme, and not a very well thought through by us. Next day we almost completely spent in search of an idea for the unconventional weapon of our game and fine-tuning of the concept of the game on paper. In the end, it was decided that our weapon will be a USB flash drive with a virus and we will be using it to “kill” computers.

While I was carefully documenting what must happen and when, trying to convincingly write some features in, and give reason why we definitely need them, our most valued team member – programmer has already made a working game prototype.

The whole day of Sunday our artists had continuously been working on 3d assets, interface, textures, etc. Programmer had been working on improving of the game features and fixing of the bugs, which I thoroughly tried to find in the breaks between creating of the sound effects (which were not included in the jam version).

When the last day of Ludum Dare Jam came, I thought we still had plenty of time… I unhurriedly started on the level design. Not before 2 hours until submission, I understood that we won’t be able to put everything that possibly could be in the game in the remaining time. I hurryingly sent the only level to the programmer and… Her computer refused to see all the work that had been done. Meanwhile it was only an hour before submission. We hastily tried to find a solution to the arose problem, and it turned out the only problem was an older version of Unity…

After submitting, we wished to have a sigh of relief, but there were bugs that had prevented people play the game. And a surprise from Google Chrome for Unity developers…

During the weeks of voting, we received a lot of helpful comments and I hope they will help us to turn this game into something really good. We have played many wonderful, intriguing, innovative games, and have seen a bunch of not so great ones.

I want to wish all of the participants to keep improving their projects (if they consider it worthwhile, of course) and never lose the inspiration spark. Thank you all for a great gamejam =)