You Only Dare Thrice: Wrapup and Post-mortem

This was my third ludum dare (in which I submitted something) and the second in which I actually produced anything resembling a finished product (the first entry was pretty but did not contain a game and barely ran on anyone’s computers but my own, it also ran awfully and took so long to load and generate the map that a lot of people assumed it wasn’t working and closed the tab, only to discover that it locked up the browser whilst loading! Quite a feat). This time I planned my time carefully pre-dare, taking off the Friday beforehand (so that I wouldn’t be coming home from work tired) and the Monday after (so that I could work up to the deadline if needed). Actual chronological order might be different from what is presented here due to the fallibility of human memory, but the actual events are mostly true.

I had planned on staying up to the theme announcement (2am local), planning for an hour or two and then going to bed, expecting to be up fairly early to start work. I had planned breaks around midday on both days to go to the shops to get me out of the house, ensure I didn’t spend the entire weekend staring at a tiny screen and to give me some enforced time to mull things over. This was, personally, invaluable, especially on day 2 when I was starting to doubt I was ever going to get over my coordinate woes (more on that later).

2am rolled around and the theme was announced! I was actually making a cup of tea at the time and started planning about 2:10. About twenty minutes of brainstorming later, and I’d settled on the idea of a bunch of spies trying to steal unconventional weapons. For this I’d need a map, some places for spies to steal from and randomly generated people to steal from/talk to. Originally it was going to be on a city scale, but then I decided a per-building scale would be better. Having written this all down, I went to bed thinking of all the things I could do with AI spies running around, the wonderful maps I’d make and so on and so forth.

Woke up, had a cup of tea, wrote down some of my thoughts from the night and headed out. Came back, ate bacon and then got to work. I cribbed some setup code from the three.js docs and set to work on the various maps (texture, bump, specular). I made a rough and ready slope detection map that let me mark certain areas as being too steep to put buildings on that I’d like to explore more of in the future. I briefly experimented with using a mesh for height instead of bump mapping (as the fact it’s actually flat becomes really obvious once you start putting things on the map) but had issues getting the mesh to line up with the texture. After wasting an hour on this, I ordered a curry and gave myself until the curry arrived to fix it. The curry arrived and I reverted to the bump map.

Having gotten map generation to a point where it wasn’t awful and having added a day/night cycle I went to bed around 1am. Woke up about nine, went out to the shops, ate bacon and poached eggs and got back to work. I added camera movement, rotation, improved the map a few times. Whilst I was working on the camera movement I wasted almost an hour on correct camera rotation only to discover everything was actually at 90 degrees and that I’d gotten my coordinates in the wrong order. However, I quickly realised that I was running out of time and I didn’t actually have a game.

Plans got paired down repeatedly and after some procrastination (which I justified to myself as not getting burned out) I stopped about half eleven with the game as it was submitted, where it was finally possible to “win”. It was quite far from the game I’d set out to make, but it was a game (for some definition of game) and I’d made it in 48 hours.

Really, I should have started at it backwards. Get the AI, the game logic, the actual mechanics of the game in first and then, if I had time, add the nice shiny bits. The game as I envisaged it would have worked 90% of the way as a text adventure, so I should have started with that. You can see a bit of what I wanted the game to be in the psuedo-real time aspects, really I should have made talking to people take a random amount of time as well, but hey ho I didn’t. I had considered making procedural textures for the buildings, but had to abandon that as well.

All in, I’m massively chuffed that I finished something. If I manage to beat my ranking last time I’ll be happy, and hopefully I’ll be better prepared for LD33.

You Only Dare Thrice: please have a go and rate it, instructions can be found in the description.