“Chompy” Postmortem

Meet Chompy. A little baby monster. His parents are running him through a training course for young monsters where he attacks human dummy targets and avoids obstacles.

Please drop by and play/rate if you get a chance. Leave a note or link to your game and I’ll try to do the same. The game has some meat to it, and is 9 levels long, some of which are very hard. May require some twitch reflexes. Just be patient.

Tools

• Unity 5, c#
• Pixen (osx) for pixel art, animation and level editing
• Sublime Text 3 for c# coding
• cfxr for sound effects

What went right

• I knew I wanted to do a top down 2D game and I knew I wanted to read levels from an image in a pixel editor. So I had initial momentum.
• I didn’t start right at 8pm or start streaming then. I waited until about midnight. I wanted to plan and form up some opinions for the theme. It’s hard for me to think on stream, as you can have pressure to “go”.
• End result was level based, which I planned, as I wanted to have a longer/meatier game that in the past. Curious to see if that’s reflected in scores at all.
• Art style. I purposely selected super lo-fi art so I could do more of it.

What went wrong

• Inexperience with Unity’s Animator system – again. Lost at least 5-6 hours to this in couple hour chunks. This time I will play with it some more post-compo and take detailed notes and shots on setup and use of animations. This could have been solved with more work between jams.
• Didn’t start making levels until Sunday. Most of Friday (8 hours) was lost to implementation and tech stumbling. Saturday was more of the same and although I had all my mechanics programmed and test maps, I hadn’t done any real maps. With 3 hours sleep Sat night, I woke up with 5 hours to go for finish and had to make levels, sounds, title screens and that was too much. The levels are ok but I think a couple suffer from this.
• Had a minor meltdown as we entered the last hour or so and sounds were having issues. It was just an issue with tools, but with 3 hours sleep and the pressure of the end of the jam, it was a nightmare for me. Takeaway is I should have imported 1-2 test sounds Friday night to test the path and make sure it was all good. I assumed I was good since it was the same stuff from last LD. But surprises like this in the final couple hours are heart attack inducing. Do 1 of everything as soon as possible.
• Lost 2-3 hours on the level import tech. It reads pixel colors from an image and spawns objects. Simple. Should have been 30 mins. Turns out the issue was my texture was being scaled since it was a non power of 2 so all the pixel reads were off. This, again, was a lack of experience thing. Takeaway is 1) more practice pre jam and 2) always count on losing hours to unexpected issues until you’ve mastered more of your tools.

I’m happy with the end results. Possibly more than my past efforts. I think the gameplay is there and there’s enough meat to warrant people’s time. And there’s a serious challenge as well. It’s pretty balanced and nothing feels “off” to me. I wanted to incorporate story more and have a nice little animated beginning and end, but that was sacrificed due to time loss.

Please play/rate and leave a comment. I’d appreciate it.