C.I.P.C postmortem / evaluation
I’m from the Netherlands so there is no real friday-night start as the theme is announced around 4am. Anyway somehow i felt i needed to incorporate both theme’s and i went for ‘not growing’ or ‘prevent-growing’ with 2 buttons as a start for a kind of snake game, where you are not the snake. I liked my idea but it didn’t seem that much fun yet, and I really wasn’t feeling the theme’s. So I spend the rest of the day making music, hoping it would get me more excited and it did, I used some of the free 8-bit VST’s by Odosynths: 38911 Bytes by Odosynths (free vst) for the retro feel.
So next day, I went on with the idea and wanted my snakes/worms to grow from eating and to show their paths, I guess I chose the most difficult rode to achieve this :) but a big part of the LudumDare experience for me is always trying to learn something new, so what the hell, I thought a voxel implementation of this idea would solve all my problems, I had already decided to go for the jam in stead of the compo anyway..
I found this excellent: Voxel Tutorial by AlexStv for using dynamic changing voxels
Since I hadn’t used a voxeltechnique before it took me about half a day to understand, implement and tweak it. My implementation is loosely based on the tutorials and has quite a lot of modifications, mainly for speed and memory usage, as i was running into problems with webgl memory size, and most of my planet needed no dynamic voxels. The Slice on the other hand uses a lot of dynamioc voxels, so i made different voxel-chunk sizes for different parts. In the end I spend about another half day getting it to work properly within a 256mb webgl app and having a decent framerate and I converted most of the generated voxels to static unity meshes. All in all very educative but this took a big bite out of my compo-time.
I’ve added some cheap perlin-like noise for selecting different offsets in a texturemap
to create the animated planet core I made a map-creation-texture:
which selects a voxeltype dependent on brightness. so on the outside of the planet/map it will use the perlin noise voxel I already had in place. On most of the slice it will use a voxel with a fixed vertical texture offset depending on the brightness of the creation-map. both voxeltypes use the same material/texture, the difference is only the vertical texture map offset:
texturemap is constantly scrolling to the right.so some of the color animate, while others stay the same. The worms use a simple wander technique but when they get to the edge a steering vector towards the center of planet takes over. Just a few hours left for the real gameplay which is kind of sad and it shows in the game, i had a lot more idea’s like worms splitting in 2 when they are hit, worm being able to destroy the towers and so on. I always try to keep it simple but I’ve never managed to on Ludum Dare so far and graphics and music took a big bite out of gameplay again. But I fininshed in time with a playable game so i am still satisfied with the result, next time I will try gameplay first again.
If you were interested, I hope this gave you some insight in some of the making of the game. If you feel like checking it out, here is:
Source: ludumdare.com archive