Beak Free Birdie

Entry: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-21/?action=rate&uid=5470
Timelapse: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQfTh-Z26wU

This is my first entry to Ludum Dare, and one of my first Unity games, as I’ve only recently started using it. Development went fairly well and I was on time for most of my goals, I only had about 8 hours sleep during the 48 period though, but not all of it was spent at the PC.

What went right:

- The competition began at 11AM local time(JST), meaning I basically woke up normally and was right into dev
- My game idea was really simple to pull off, in fact, the core gameplay was done in about 30 mins, the rest was spent polishing everything
- The artwork turned out better than I expected

What went wrong: 

- It took me over 5 hours to come up with a game idea based on the theme
- My library had some bugs in that I spent some valuable time fixing
- My library lacked some features like the ability to swap out textures for UI elements, this meant I couldn’t implement a mute button in time without using major hacks
- I didn’t have any plan about how to make music, so I didn’t
- I didn’t have  any generic code to handle 2D animations, so I had to settle for very basic texture swapping which took a while to write and didn’t allow me to implement anything complex
- Apparently the sound effects caused people to want to vomit, even though I thought I set the volume quite low :’(
- I had no code ready to make creation of collision meshes easier

Summary: 

It was a great first attempt, next time I’ll be far more prepared and way more code ready to save me time during development. The IRC is cool, it’s full of helpful people and the structure of the competition is very nice. Next time there’ll probably be even more entries, so that should be fun!

This entry was posted on Monday, August 22nd, 2011 at 10:09 pm and is filed under LD #21. 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.