I’m going to be honest (and critical) with you on this one, and some of you may hate me for writing this, but it is the truth (of what I mostly saw with Unity Games for LD22), and it should help everyone next time around. I’m going to make it simple with a list:

What You Should Avoid

• Texture-less, poorly lighted levels
• Ambient light being left at the default grey
• Poor usage of physics (ex: the player being the only physic object in the game)
• The default player movement setup (With the player having extreme jumping abilities and almost no gravity)
• Menu-less, single scene, test games
• Places to fall out of the world
• A default sky-box or default light blue background
• Lag
• 3D text with the default font
• Support for only 1 resolution

Little Things Some Games Have That Make ALL The Difference (AKA: What you should have)

• Lock Cursor and Pause capabilities
• Animations on items in hand
• Ragdoll physics or physics objects
• Sprinting
• Crouching
• Multiple Items to hold
• A menu
• Sound
• Options (Ex: mouse sensitivity, quality settings (to remove lag), fog distance, clipping distance, etc)
• In-game Instructions
• A good GUI (Displays health, ammo, instructions, etc) Not the default GUI skin
• Complete usage of Player Settings (Company name, logo, game name, app name, resolutions, config dialog banner, etc)

I could go on and on with this list, but you get the idea. Basically the main thing to worry about is Making it an actual game and not a “Test”. I recommend you don’t send in your “Test” to a Ludum Dare competition, unless you want to get this endless list again by play testers…

When I did LD22 I pretty much tried to focus on all the little things that made it look like a good game. Although while I’m being extremely critical about games, I have to say my entry Isolated Assault did not follow all these lists… but I got the important ones out of the way (Lock Cursor, pause, animations, physics, many resolutions support, menu, instructions………. just play the game. )

But I never said you have to follow the list exactly, just keep it in mind!

Stay critical, and I hope all of you (Just a general statement. I noticed a few Unity games stood out that actually had these) actually keep in mind the little things next time around!

Tags: games, tips, unity3d

This entry was posted on Monday, January 2nd, 2012 at 2:51 pm and is filed under LD #22. 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.