Block Wars was intended to be a simple First person shooter that would depict some kind of war fight. I knew I wanted dual weapons, and enemies, and some other nice features.

-  Weapons and Hands

Building the code for the weapons was really easy, I was able to create a base Weapon class and derive new weapons from it without much of an issue, The next part was to make the ability of the user’s player aware of two hands and which weapon and it’s statistics. it was just as easy as the weapons and was able to derive a left hand and right hand from a base hand class and within no time i had a machine gun in each hand and can fire each and have rules/stats on the weapon that the character (player or AI) would pick up would immediately be aware of.

- Terrain
Unity3d is extremely flexible and I was able to make the entire terrain within a half hour and then adding the water texture plane was just a simple addition to it.

- Enemy AI logic
Although I didn’t get far enough to show off the AI logic I had put in, I was able to easily build line casts off the weapon’s location/rotation to see if a viable target crossed the line. granted it meant always 100% accuracy.

- Design issues…the evil “Feature Creep”
Initially the game wasn’t even going to be called Block Wars. I realized after a few hours that I had way too many wants. I was planning on having real characters that were rigged. Being a programmer primarily I saw how impossible this was for me as I had next to no experience in 3ds max. and so after a few messups I changed the design to block characters. and named the game Block Wars.

- Plan for the Unknown
On the second day of the competition I really had to crunch to make advances in the game, but what i didn’t expect was a power outage to occur for 4 hours. This was devastating and was part of the reason i didn’t finish. But in general when planning for a project always add for the unknown issue. For instance you could get really sick, or have to do something that will take you away from your computer.

- Spent too long on the little things
The other thing was that in the end I was tweaking things to be perfect when I should of waited until the end and then start polishing. So I have added a new rule in building, that is make everything Tweakable, and Tweak last. and if you see something that needs to be tweaked write it down as a polish task.  Get the game completed first, It is no good to tweak something if you never finish it.

Final notes

In the end though I had an awesome time doing this and plan to do another Ludum Dare in the future. But first I will finish Block Wars and put it up on our website “http://fatcowgames.net”.  The Ludum dare is a great way to prove what you know and on top of that it is a great way to learn so much in such a short time.

 

I am a programmer, so the hard part for me will be the graphics, sound and music this should be a fun and great learning experience.  This will be my first entry into LD.  I will probably play it safe and do a WAR FPS.

below is my tools. I may edit this post later if i decide to use other tools for the audio section.

Good luck everyone else entering!!