It’s dead, Jim.
December 14th, 2009 5:02 amOK, the compo is over… back to the real world where it’s cold outside and I badly need some sleep…
But first in case you missed it, here’s my final entry. And now some post mortemy things:
Various tools and utensils:
Unity 3D (free version), Photoshop CS2, Cinema 4D R10, sfxr, Reason 3.0, Wacom Intuos 3 tablet, stupid midi keyboard with no driver for windows 7 (I wasted almost two hours to install the hardware to use it with a midi cable before the compo and only used it to enter 3 notes)
Awesome:
- I finished a game.
(seriously the motivation to participate in this LD was unexpected and sudden) - Unity is AWESOME! Really easy to use even with no previous experience using it.
- sfxr allowed me to make a few sounds in less than 5 minutes!
Lame:
- Not enough preparation. I lost a lot of time learning how to do basic things in Unity while making my game.
- I thought I had a great idea: you would explore the level and logically find out where the hidden tiles are. Unfortunately in practice, with the limited gameplay elements I could implement, there is too much guess work and not enough “exploration”. The concept would have needed a lot of experimenting and more concepts (maybe something Minesweeper-like) so that it would be really possible to deduce the position of the hidden tiles.
- Wasted time making a nice 3D platformer camera thing when a fixed orientation camera would have been enough and would have made the game easier to play with a keyboard.
- Spent too much time tweaking some graphic details that made no real difference in the final result
- I downloaded ChronoLapse, but then wasn’t motivated to record a timelapse and now I regret it.
Conclusion: I’m going to use Unity again. With basically no previous knowledge, it was already a little bit faster than doing things from scratch (and I got some extra effects for free), I can only imagine what would be possible if I knew it well.