Good

• My zombie! I’m really proud of my ugly zombie. Yes, I spent a lot of time on it and it isn’t good art by any standard but I don’t care. It was worth it to see it “alive” in my game
• I only realized that after I was done but I kind of made the game I wanted to do for December 2010′s LD. Except then I had found myself making an alien instead of the zombie I had planned to do and then gave up before I had gameplay anyway. So it’s like I tied up a loose end.
• The jam. If not for the jam I wouldn’t have been able to finish my game and the LD would have just ended in bitter disappointment for me.
• My trusty ZBrush was awesome: sculpting/painting the zombie was the most fun part of this LD, Blender was also great for animating it.

Gray Area

• Making the low-poly retopology took more time than I thought. I tried TopoGun which I had just bought a few days before the compo and never used.  That added a few hours of work but then TopoGun worked really well for generating the color and normal map from the sculpt.

Bad

• I missed the compo deadline and had to do the jam
• I was generally not very fast. Lack of concentration maybe? Everything seemed to take just longer than it usually would.
• I spent the same amount of time on the environment than on the zombie and yet it really doesn’t show.  I just wasted time noodling with bits cut from my original hallway model and just made a mess and had to restart again. It was a time sink for no reason.
• Simplistic gameplay. I wanted to make the game more about stealth.
• I still suck at using Modo. It’s a great software I have no doubt of that and I mostly knew how to use it. But somehow I still find myself struggling against it every step. I don’t know how to explain what it is exactly. It’s weird and it’s probably just that I lack the practice to have the right instincts but it’s really annoying when trying to speed model and everything reacts in a slightly unexpected way and I keep having to undo and try again. I’ve got to spend more time using it.
• Still no time for particles effects. I put them on my priority list for this LD and still neglected them.

Time use

• Code: 11.2h (includes setting things up in Unity)

• Model: 9.3h
• Texture: 4.7h
• Animation: 3.5h
• Sound: 2.4h
• Level building: 7.6h (half of it wasted on a discarded version)
• Sleep: 24h
• Doing other things: 3.4h
• Misc: 5.5h (probably 50% actual work the rest being posting WIPs, chatting on the IRC channel, etc)

• Total spent on zombie (including sounds, code, etc):  15.5h
• Total spent on the environment/level (incl. medkit props and ambient soundtrack): 15.4h

PLAY THE FINAL VERSION

So I managed to finish a game. Not in 48 hours as intended but 72 Well, I thought that might be the case.  So I didn’t worry too much when I lost a lot of time doing the cute little character.

Can you find the kitty?

OK now it looks like a game. But less than 6 hours are left on the counter to make some levels.

I need the sugar

Here’s what I have so far. Unfortunately it’s not a game yet. Maybe I’ll be able to get something fun to play tomorrow for the jam.

So things are going very slowly this time.

I still don’t have a game but I have my animated zombie that can follow and attack the player. The AI is not too great of course but this is a zombie so it might be realistic

Time to eat a pizza!

The staple food of geeks

Braaaaaains!

So I finally have my zombie all rigged and ready for animations. I lost a lot of time in Topogun doing the low-res version from the ZBrush high-res sculpt. It was the first time I used Topogun and it was a really slow process :/ Also I had some problems with the Rigify auto-rigging thing in Blender, I’m not sure what happened but last LD it worked right away. Unfortunately I have not used it since then and I must have done something wrong this time. All sorted now but I’m far from having a game done. It already looks like I’ll have to do the jam instead of the compo.

Are you sure there is no one there?

Slow progress on the environment…

Modeled in Modo, textures with Photoshop and FilterForge, rendered in Unity

OK so the theme is “Alone” (you probably know that).

So here are my thoughts after 1 hour of waking up/brainstorming:

• Survival horror, rather obvious but it’s still my #1 idea. It might be a lot of fun to create. I can make ZBrush zombies and monsters which I love to do   But a decent 3D environment takes a lot of time and I’ll probably end up with a not very polished game (as usual).
• SETI. Find out if you’re alone in the universe. Nice but what would the gameplay be like? All I can think of is rather simulationy and GUI heavy which is not my style. (or shmup, now that you’ve found life, exterminate it! )
• “Home alone” themed tower defense. Might be fun
• Dating sim / visual novel. But I don’t have the right skill set for that (my drawings are horrible)

So I guess I’ll get started on the survival horror to avoid getting stuck doing nothing.

Breakfast of champions

Because desk photos are so last century.

My weapons:
Engine: Unity 3.4.2 Pro
Language: C#
2D: Photoshop CS5 Extended, Filter Forge 3, Painter 12
3D: ZBrush 4R2, Topogun 2 beta, Modo 501, Blender 2.61, Vue Infinite 10
Sound: Reason 6, Audition 1.5, SFXR

Strategy for this LD:

Ooops, do I need one?

I hope to make a game with better gameplay than last time. So I’ll try to get that working early. Also I really want to have some sounds and “music”. I might switch to doing the jam if I can’t get something good enough in the 48h. Also particles. I often neglect particle effects and they can really bring life to an otherwise empty 3d world.

Good luck everyone!