I present, 'Darkness Creeping':
The theme for this LD was 'tiny world', which at first threw me off. Id mentioned in my previous post that I was intending to make a dark, atmospheric kind of horror game. And the theme 'tiny world' didnt quite fit. But with some thought, I decided to implement a feature which let the player 'take over' and control the little cockroaches I planned to have running around the floors (the kind of little detail I love to have in games), so while playing as a cockroach you can experience their own 'tiny world'.
This would be integrated into the puzzles for the game to keep things interesting.
I also stumbled across one of my favorite features of the game, completely by accident. Id turned on 'rigid body' for the collision box for the player, and enjoyed actually playing as a character which could fall over. A few tweaks later (lots of dampening so you wouldn't fall over every time you walked over a bump), and with a self-righting mechanism to get back up, and the idea came together. A lot of people have commented on how it adds to the game, making you actually feel like a frail weak character.
At the end of the game it makes the end-boss even more challenging (I evilly put a bunch of rocks all over the hallway floor, so in the situation that you have to run away from something big and scary, your in for a bad day)
So overall I was happy with what I got done. The game itself is a bit glitchy in various ways, and I had to update several times after the LD was finished in order to make it playable. The main issue is BGE's collisions, which put simply are terrible. I later found out that scaling the scene up larger made the collisions better (wish Id known this before!). Also the BGE's slow performance started to show. The game isnt very optimized, although having said that, Im impressed that the armature system has been improved so much for realtime applications. I successfully had 40+ cockroaches all running around (animated and with armatures) along with a couple of spiders, with little hit on the fps.
Heres a timelapse of the entire 48 hours, its focused on only one of my screens (I have a 2nd screen, which was used for everything not related to the main work in creating the game)
Voting for this Ludum Dare is 1 day away from finishing, Ive had a lot of good feedback (and a bunch of valid complaints), so it will be interesting to see how my game ranks. I even found the other day, on the front page of the LD site, that someone had featured my game in their favorites - which is awesome to see.
Overall I expect the mood category to be the area I scored best in, possibly innovation as well. Might do decently in graphics as well, since Im one of the few who made a 3D game for this LD (most people stick to 2D games)
The main LD page for the game is linked below. You can download and play the game from there, and Ive made the source files available as well.
[Darkness Creeping]
Anicator was nice enough to feature the game on the front page of his wip Blender games site bGame as well: http://bgame.anicator.com/games/game.php?id=84
And finally, to see how I progressed though the LD, heres all the posts I made this time round:
- Third Time Lucky - Im in
- 48 Hours remaining
- 41 Hours to go progress
- 19 Hours to go
- 11 Hours remain
- Ludum Dare 23 postmortem
- Timelapse posted
Looking forward to the next Ludum Dare!
