'DINO BOLT' Postmortem, Ludum Dare 30

'DINO BOLT' Postmortem

Created in 48 hours for Ludum Dare 30 (Aug 24, 2014)
Theme: 'Connected Worlds'

Play it here: http://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/2926749/LD30/LD30.html

Ludum Dare page: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=8631

DINO BOLT is about a pair of dinosaurs running from time-traveling zookeepers bent on capturing them.

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ON GAME JAMS

Ludum Dare (www.ludumdare.com), is a wonderful thing. You have 48 hours to make a game from nothing. Thousands of people participate and it's one of, if not the largest game jam. If you have any interest in making games, hobbyist, amateur, semi-pro or pro, I recommend you try it sometime. It's challenging, brutal, humbling and rewarding.

This was my 6th time to participate.

When you play DINO BOLT, it's a simple game and it's easy to dismiss it as you only see the final project. But the idea of DINO BOLT is important. It didn't exist 48hrs ago. It wouldn't have existed without a game jam and my competitive nature to force me to make something in a specific time. I'd have gotten into it, and stopped after becoming bored with it, as I have so many game prototypes. The deadline made me finish it.

48 hours is not a lot of time. Factoring in sleep, you're luck to maybe have about 30 hours of real working time over the weekend. There are two killers to progress. Scope and ignorance. I've tried to address scope by tending toward making very tiny games that may be suitable for mobile. As to ignorance...sigh...only time and practice with Unity, or whatever tools, helps.

It's impossible to learn new tools and things during a jam. There's simply not enough time. Invariably I get stuck for two hours at a time, several times, each game because I'm ignorant of my tools or how to implement something. This is why making things on a regular basis is important. You learn. Don't wait for game jams to make games. Wait for game jams to make your BEST games.

This time I lost a couple hours to struggling with my own ignorance over Unity's Animator tool. Turns out it was working right and I had a code issue that I assumed was right (for 2+ hours). When I backtracked to the beginning and assumed nothing (and had a helpful Google search) I found the issue. I wish I had those 2 hours back. I struggled for a couple hours with basic math and sine waves on things. Simple stuff. Once you know it and have experience with it. I wish I had those 2 hours back. I struggled with a particular feature on a plugin I use all the time. Then a stream commentator said "You can do X". I was like O_o! Ignorance strikes again. This is why you make things. You get better every time.

When making a game you push things off like "Sounds are easy. I can use SFXR and make them in seconds". True. Then you have to hook them up in code. Then you may need to tweak volumes to balance them. Then you stumble around the sound tool looking for how to do that. Then you realize that if you pitch shifted sounds they'd sound better, or...Everything takes 5x more time and effort than you expect. Especially if you aren't proficient at it and haven't done it 10 times before.

MAKING THE GAME

I knew I wanted to make a small scope, mobile scale game. I knew I wanted to make something hard, and fast. So I settled on a simple avoidance style game that's become so popular. Flappy Bird, Timberman, Swing Copters, dEXTRIS, etc. In the end I got closer to cloning dEXTRIX than I would have liked, but 48 hours...

SESSION 1:
Friday 8pm until Saturday at 9am or so. (13 hours)

I had the core gameplay loop (movement and avoiding walls) in by midnight Fri, after a brief few hours. I would have been half the time...but ignorance. From midnight to early AM was spent on content production. Art, drawing animation and struggling with code, etc. I should have explored gameplay and design some more but "had plenty of time". Game Jam fallacy.

Not being terribly fast with art, I probably spent 3 hours drawing/animating the dino's.

Content with where I was I went to sleep. I had the core game done and 1st pass art. I was good.

Asleep by noon? Watched an episode of Firefly to unwind.

SESSION 2:
Saturday 7pm until Sunday 8pm when the competition ended. (25 hours)

I kept meaning to go to sleep but there was always one more thing. Many, many, one more things. Once I passed 9am Sunday AM I knew I was doomed to staying up. The girlfriend walked by and said "Powering through?" as I grunted something that might have been english.

Fortunately as I was nodding off and exhausted I'd stumble upon a feature that excited me and that would spur me on for an hour or so. But there are many times when you think "Is this really worth it?". It is, but it's a painful process.

I kept meaning to get to one code design element but never did. I liked the idea that you could pickup another dino, after losing one, that would buy you an extra hit (like Galaga) but never implemented it. I should have made time for it but it was a scary unknown, and I had a working game and I had a massive to-do list of unfinished items.

Got some really useful tips and design ideas from people watching the stream on Twitch. Thanks guys. The game was originally going to have a Jeep following the Dino's, and I was going to have to deal with some basic AI pathing so it could avoid barriers. This was early Sunday AM as I was fading. A suggestion came in for making it a flying vehicle. Duh. That was cooler and it avoided having to path around anything. Done. So, the helicopter was born.

Code got really sloppy as there's always pressure to just get something in, vs
doing it right. Most notably, I skipped doing a state machine for game state/
menus, and that was painful (as I knew it would be) and led to lost time due to maintenance. Never again :) Also some horrible copy/paste code vs making nice functions. Oh well.

In the end the game is only about 1200 lines of code. Thanks Unity.

STATS

38 hours of work
1200 lines of code (Sublime Text 3 + Unity3D)
4 animations (Pixen)
10 sound effects (SFXR + Audacity)
5 songs (procedurally generated with a Python script)
29 textures (Pixen)

EPILOGUE

I'm proud that the game feels complete and like a finished game after only
48 hours. I do with I'd spent more time on design, as always. Implementation normally wins the priority contest in 48 hours though. I don't spend a lot of time thinking about the design beforehand as that feeling like cheating and once forced with a ticking clock, it's easy to fall back on ABC design.

After a minor stroke in mid May and feel very fortunate to be here and in good enough health to have been able to participate.

I have massive respect for and am continually humbled by other Ludum Dare game entries.

Please make a point of trying some of the probably 2500 games that will be submitted this time. www.ludumdare.com

If you want to make games, just do it. No excuses.

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George Broussard (@georgeb3dr)