Post Mortem: Arnold Stallion’s Pump or Die

Arnold Stallion’s Pump or Die was probably one of the hardest Ludum Dares for us. It took longer than usual to come up with and idea that fit the theme, even though the theme itself wasn’t that hard. Afterwards we came up with lots of new ideas, but stuck to the original. One of the reasons was that we’d already madeWerewolf Among Others, which also had a shapeshifting mechanic, so we wanted to come up with something new.

Pumpin’ on the beach

What got us started was the pun that ended up in the game too: “Press Shift to get in shape” – although in retrospect shift wasn’t a very good key to use in a web game (on Windows it opens sticky keys dialog). We stuck to the default Unity input keys, which caused other problems too, as alt keeps opening the browser menu and on OSX ctrl+arrow switches desktop. We ended up doing a small fix (no coding needed, we just changed the settings from Input) to add z/x/c alternative controls – and a support for Xbox 360 controller (even that didn’t require any code changes and it probably would have worked on Windows with the original build too!).

I can’t really recall what got us from bodybuilding to beat ’em up, but as perceived by several commenters, we decided to use River City Random as a reference. The art style was simple enough so we could produce enough sprites and it worked well with the bodybuilder theme.

LOL – Lots of Love!

We had some frustration especially on Sunday, as the game wasn’t shaping up good enough, there were a lot of problems with bugs and controls and the gameplay just didn’t feel that fun. It was on Monday evening, after work when we were polishing the game and adding the final features everything came together. We had planned the ‘magic girl’ feature in the beginning, but seeing it in action really made the game feel right.

Another thing we had some doubts on was the humour; it felt a bit too crude, but we decided to stick with it (you know, no time to change it) and judging from the comments so far I’m glad we did!

We probably should have made a bit harder, but I think it’s nice if you can play through a Ludum Dare game in a short time. Originally it was too hard, and we might have overcompensated a bit.

This was the first time we had a second artist, and damn that helped a lot!

In retrospect, we’re really happy how the game turned up and so far the feedback has been really good too!