Well i’ve been stupidly busy at work at the moment so I haven’t really had any time to evaluate how it went properly, so here it is:

Things that went well:

• Graphics – I was overall rather happy with the art in the end, it’s really my first time doing my own art at all (short of modelling some stuff from TRON for fun) and I was surprised at how motivated I was to just continue doing it, i’m usually so terrible with drawing and so on that I tend to rely on others for this sort of thing but with super low-res pixel art it’s so confining it’s hard to get it wrong if you don’t mind stuff looking a bit silly.
• Controls – I don’t want to take credit for Unity’s physics or anything, but this was the first time i’ve done 2D platforming mechanics in Unity and was pretty happy with the result, jumping is a bit weird as I was trying to achieve jump height relative to the amount of time the button is pressed down but apart from that it came off well enough, if a bit heavy feeling.
• Getting it done – I was waylaid by a series of small jobs I had to do around the flat and helping people out with various computer problems, so most of all i’m just happy it was a somewhat complete product.

Things that went badly:

• Sound – Pretty obvious one given that there wasn’t any, I tried to record some basic stuff on my guitar but I couldn’t record it cleanly enough and trying to learn Musagi in the 3 hours I had to do sound proved way too much. I didn’t know about sfxr either so I gave up on sound effects altogether. Next time i’ll be much more ready for this sort of thing and if the theme fits i’ll probably be doing some form of rythm based game.
• Length – Again another pretty obvious problem with it, there’s literally 30 seconds of gameplay tops, primarily due to me building the level with about 5 minutes left and I wanted to make sure it looked right. I didn’t realise you could submit 15-20 minutes late otherwise I probably would’ve had 3-4 levels of significant but repetitive length.
• Dead bodies – Yeah those floating things are meant to be dead bodies, I have no idea how i’m meant to do those properly given the limited amount of pixels but they’re remarkably abstract.

I’m sure there’s other things that went wrong and right with it but those are the main things that come to mind.

Going forward i’m not sure if i’ll continue with it as a game, it’s a rather boring concept and i’m not a huge fan of the cliché’d super hard indie platformer genre, but if people actually want more levels i’m more than happy to implement some of the extra art I did and put together some interesting levels. The theme was fun but I couldn’t really think of anything that interesting to do other than the play on words in the title, but if anyone comes up with any interesting mechanics related to buoyancy and general island jumping I could easily get motivated again.

With regards to the whole debate about Unity/Game Maker/etc i’m a bit on the fence, I’ve done a lot of C++ with SDL/GL/D3D projects in the past and it’s such a laborious, un-fun experience I don’t really have a lot of inclination to take part in a strict competition like that. That said I think each game should be evaluated based on the amount of work gone into it, if you’re using a pre-made engine there should either be significantly more content, or some form of mechanic that would be too time consuming if you had to do the base engine for it too. Then again with that attitude you could end up with people forcing themselves to do contrived game concepts over simplistic but brilliant ideas just to keep up with the joneses. I guess the whole Tech category thing could work but then again that could result in LD being a glorified tech demo event, although it is balanced with the other categories (this was my first LD so i’m unsure as to why it was added then removed previously).

I’ll either be taking place in the Mini-LD this month or in the EGP for this month (High Velocity theme sounds pretty fun to play about with). It’s really fun taking part in these contests and getting feedback, it’s really nice to have people take the time to look at your stuff and give constructive feedback, I tend to be hyper-critical of myself so when people have fun with anything I make it’s a pleasant surprise. I’m working through the list myself and it’s pretty incredible to see how some people interpret the theme and how some people can achieve so much in so little time.

I’m open to collaboration on interesting game concepts (especially if they’re in Unity) so if anyone is serious about a particularly interesting concept or prototype and is capable of finishing products to completion with a high degree of polish i’m more than interested in helping (although with full time work I don’t have a huge amount of time). On another note my company (www.rubixstudios.co.uk) may be looking for a freelance chiptune composer for an upcoming iPhone project so if anyone wants to throw their hat into that ring, PM me here or email me at billy (at) rubixstudios.co.uk.

Lots of love,

Billy ‘brian’ Fletcher.

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 2nd, 2010 at 10:18 am and is filed under LD #17 - Islands - 2010. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.