First the timelapse:

Time Use:

Code (9 hours):

• 4 hours on helicopter and camera control
• 4 hours on NPC behavior, gameplay logic, GUI and integration
• almost an extra hour of debugging a silly bug at 4am when it was time to submit

Graphics (22 hours):

• 1h for the skybox
• 30m for taking photos for textures
• 14h30 (!!!) world creation (modelling and texturing, the buildings and roads and being OCD about it, including 5 hours on the stupid modular road thing)
• 3h15 helicopter model
• 2h40 prisoner model incl. animations

Misc:

• 2h brainstorming

Total: 33 hours / 48

And now post-mortem:

Pro Style:

• Motivation: I was really motivated to get a game done no matter what. I didn’t get distracted by other things, woke up early and used all my available time. At the beginning of the second day I thought about restarting another game as I wasn’t too pleased with this one but I kept going. 4 hours before the deadline I hadn’t even started adding some gameplay but I still continued and in the end I made a game in less than 48 hours (I was a bit late on the dead line due to last minute debugging but since I was sleeping when the compo started it’s still less than 48h total)
• Ideas: I didn’t feel the usual frustration of “bleh, I don’t know what game I want to do”, I had several ideas right from the start.
• Blender: I switched to blender for character animation and it was actually the first time I tried to animate a character in blender. I had watched a few tutorials weeks before so I wasn’t completely clueless still this could have turned into a time sink It wasn’t Blender Just WorksTM. 
• Unity 3D: still awesome, ZBrush: still awesome, not much else to say about those :]

Noob mistakes:

• Not being so good with my 3d software. I just don’t do enough 3d, I do spend time learning them, watching video tutorials (because i can do that while being lazy) but it’s hard to be fast when only actually putting things into practice twice a year for a ludum dare.
• OCD. I wasted a lot of time obsessing over unimportant details. Getting good UV maps, editing small texture details. This was ridiculous, I don’t know why I got so obsessed with little things this time.
• The modular road system: I had a perfectly fine road grid you can see it in my WIP video post. Sure it wasn’t perfect, the roads kind of ended in weird ways but it was Good Enough. Instead I decided to make some modular elements: intersections, turns. Why did I think my helicopter game needed good roads that badly? Then turning my roads into modular tiles didn’t work as expected. I hadn’t carefully planned a good system. So nothing was aligned properly. And then persisted, I wasted 5 hours on those tiles until I was satisfied they aligned properly. 5 hours! More than I spent on coding the gameplay!
• No time to tweak the gameplay. It’s very boring as it is. Due to the time I lost I barely finished some gameplay in time and had to debug in overtime. I could test the gameplay logic by accelerating the time but I didn’t really play my game until after I had submitted it. Too late to fix the gameplay.
• no sound or music :/

I wish I could have made a jam entry out of it and taken the extra day to polish it, but since I had to work on Monday and then finally get some sleep after that I wouldn’t have gained anything by not going for the compo. A lot could be added to this game, I wish there could have been some shooting involved and cars and it could become like a mini-GTA! well if only I had a few months or years

No gameplay yet v___v

well, almost 13 hours left!!

Just some placeholders and a skybox. I have some helicopter controls working but I’ll probably want to spend time improving them.

Pretend you can hear the Ride of the Valkyries

I don’t think there is a single best method to do the Ludum Dare. I’m no expert and you may agree or disagree with my ideas but I’ve finished an entry for 9 different main LDs since LD #1. I’ve also failed many times and learned from those as well.

Get übermotivated

Making a game in 48 hours is hard. There will be times when you feel discouraged by your lack of progress, skills or inspiration. If you’re going to finish a game this weekend, you need to make that your #1 priority. Don’t start the LD without knowing that no matter what, you’ll make a game this weekend. Maybe a very shitty game if things don’t go your way, maybe an awesome game, but a game no matter what. Don’t have any doubt about it and it won’t be a problem.

The excitement here and on IRC before the compo is a great way to build up that motivation, but be careful that once the compo is started it can work against you when others seem to be advancing their game more quickly.

(more…)

Nothing will prevent me from completing a game this weekend!

Engine: Unity 3D Pro (coding in C#)
Graphics pipeline: Modo 501, ZBrush 4.0, Blender 2.59, Photoshop CS5 Extended
Sound: Reason 5, Audition 1.5