MatterSplatter: Play in browser here: LINKY-LINK

This is my first LD, and I’ve loved it from start to finish. The build up, the frantic two days of cobbling something together, then the playing and rating. This community is brilliant.

So then, I guess we start with…

What Went Right

While it was my first LD, I do make games as a day job, so I knew not to try to put too many features into the game and end up with a bunch of half finished junk. No, my junk is as intended! I pretty much got all I wanted to in the game, and the bits I left out made room for a bit of polish. All in all I got a playable, sort of fully featured game done between 6am Saturday and 9pm Sunday, and got a walk round the park with the GF and a couple of pints down the pub on Sunday afternoon before the final push…!! Pacing was spot on!!  :)

I am way proud of the music. The sfx are amusing, but sfxr does that by its nature, so I can’t really take credit for that. But the music was laid down note for note in Garageband. Death music is cinema epic, IMO!  :)

Environment. I’ve been doing some development in Unity so I knew it would do for a platform, but in the whole 48 hours the game didn’t crash once. If a script hits an exception it just drops out and the game keeps running. It’s brilliant.

Controls. I wanted to make an semi-hardcore arcade game that played using keys in a browser. That I did!

Bizarro. When someone leaves the comment: ”Sex and defecation: precisely what I want from my games. We only took 31.231 seconds to inseminate the queen. Beat that!  The music is really nice, and the game itself is hilarious XD”, you know you’ve done something out of the ordinary!

What Went Wrong

Well, I concentrated on gameplay and sound, leaving the graphics functional at best… Which really doesn’t leave much for screen shots. I was worried whether anyone would actually play the thing, but such is the rad votes/cool system, that’s not been a problem!

I’ve watched family and friends play the game… it’s waaay too hard! The positive being that I’ll take this lesson into future games.

Experimentalism. Seeing the super-badassedness of other entries, I’m kind of down on the base game I came up with: move and shoot – yay! Next time I think I’ll gamble on total commitment to experimental gameplay.

Timelapse video – I forgot to restart it on the second day… Oops!!

Closing…

The game does a few cool things in Unity though, (a core object to store persistent state, cheap shadows that follow an object, spawning prefabs, collisions that respect layers, floating physics). So ask any questions you want, probably best to ask at VAMflax@gmail.com as I might not be monitoring this site regularly after voting is done.

I think the 48 hour challenge will be a once a year event for me as it’s pretty disruptive. But I do fancy the Jam, as I could get a few friends over and it be a bit more laid back, (not that it was entirely un-laid back this time!).

Next up is to bring out my current game, Chopper Mike. I’m going to do iOS and Android versions. Check progress at VAMflax.com!

To the dudes who organise this… you rule! And to the dudes who participate… you doubley rule!!

High fives all round!!!   XD

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 28th, 2012 at 4:01 pm and is filed under LD #24. 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.