Ludum Dare 33 - Page 6

Ludum Dare 33

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PicassoCT
Journeywar Developer & Mapper
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Re: Ludum Dare 33

Post by PicassoCT »

How could the citizen capturing be made more intresting?

Mind Controlled Ufo-Cult guides them towards you?
gajop
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Re: Ludum Dare 33

Post by gajop »

PicassoCT wrote:How could the citizen capturing be made more intresting?

Mind Controlled Ufo-Cult guides them towards you?
This could be done in many ways.
First off, I think citizens should hide in buildings when you approach cities, so as to encourage you to destroy them. They should also not respawn so you're forced to move onwards.
The capturing itself could be made different: e.g. by having abilities that would temporarily increase the speed/area size/target of capture, or by having certain enemies that are temporarily uncapturable (by having a time effect or some buff that you can remove).
gajop
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Re: Ludum Dare 33

Post by gajop »

Here's our post-mortem.

Lessons learned
gajop (major):
  • Way too much time was spent on making the map. I’m improving Scened with regards to the map making so we can make high quality natural and man-made maps fully in-game.
  • We should create a Wiki that defines the LD game-making process. Third party tools and Lua libraries that we used should be defined. For example OOP unit/weapon defs might have been confusing to some. I suggest we make and keep a wiki up on https://github.com/SpringCabal/SkeletonGame or some other repo and use it in all future games.
  • We need a single “devMode” setting.
  • We didn’t use Github issues enough. I did know what people were doing but at the same time I felt we could’ve communicated better.
  • I wish the engine would give us option to automatically detect user hardware and adjust our game towards it. So far the only information we have is if shaders are enabled, but nothing with regards to how *good* the CPU and GPU are. FPS was a huge issue and it has not only adversely affected our ratings but also the quality of the reviews we got (most people are just mentioning their notice of low framerates).
  • I think we should put our game on rapid before the competition starts, and get people to test it and give feedback during.
  • We should use weather effects/shaders to make the game a lot more interesting. These tricks are often easy to implement or adapt the existing ones and provide a dramatic increase in graphical quality and mood.
  • We should make our game really hard during testing to see how it plays out when playing optimally. We’ve made a mistake of making a very easy hit & run/sniping game instead of the city assault that we wanted.
  • Our game lacked (clear) goals, and it encouraged players to farm the starting areas while not destroying buildings, which is not what we wanted. We should consider these things next time.
gajop (minor):
  • I should learn 2D art + sound tools a lot more before the compo. Perhaps even basic 3D Blender model-editing skills such as model resize/texture recolor.
  • Why Flozi mad? I think there was some misunderstanding on his part that we switched fully to .dae/blender for the compo, but that was the format we used most during Gravitas too.
  • Camera crap wasting time, but mostly smooth sailing engine-wise. It also turns out we could just use /track which magically solves most of the camera issues and is smoother than what we made.
  • I think hoko managed to pull good music at the end (much better than the previous LD)
  • God gun was amazing at first but got ruined later on. There was no crater (or nearly invisible one) and the laser looked bad at the ground-hitting spot. Also related: https://github.com/SpringCabal/AlienRes ... 74e18181c7
  • Game should’ve been harder. We’ve had instant respawns and upgrades would remain so it wouldn’t be punishing.
  • We should’ve focused on making beamup more awesome -> like the later health restoration gained from it. Maybe instead of the usual abilities/weapons we could have stuff that impacted its range, speed, even direction… but that would be designing for a different game probably.
  • Gravity beam isn’t as interesting and the GFX don’t reflect its effect. I think we should be very reserved from using gravity/impulse weapons in the future for anything other than destruction (e.g. Hunted’s bombs used impulse well).
  • Black hole should’ve been a gun the enemies used! It’s pretty cool when you see yourself being dragged to a certain point.
hoko
  • The improved ratings show we’re on the right track, a lack of goal was indeed an issue though.
  • We had to give a lot of instructions to people playing, the game should be structured more linearly and hold the player’s hand.
  • It was good that I could use blender for simple things, I definitely wasn’t ready for modelling anything from scratch though.
  • Forb’s unexpected work forced me into music/sound production way too late. There should be an earlier deadline for these.
Anarchid
  • I hate CEG with a passion. Something as simple as timed repeater effect needs gadget or lups, wtf.
  • I should learn how to LUPS.
  • I spent a whole day making normals, emissions and speculars for the UFO, but then suddenly it’s not even visible at the zoom levels ingame
  • I also spent hours making an extensible folding landing gear for the UFO, which ended up only being useful for the wreckage. Hurrrr.
  • That said, i’ve had great fun doing the models.
  • Standardizing on dae was very nice because it allowed other people to make easy modifications.
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smoth
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Re: Ludum Dare 33

Post by smoth »

did you guys find a solution to z is up? or did you just switch z and y?
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Anarchid
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Re: Ludum Dare 33

Post by Anarchid »

I do not at this moment consider Z-up a problem. Z-up allows me to convert animations from blender to Spring without doing annoying euler order math.

I was able to do all the animations i did for for gravitas and area17 from a single attempt without having to reload Spring (or /luarules reloads scripts to test hand-coded params) even once.

A "fix" to this situation would add work to my plate of maintaining the export tool by requiring me to solve the euler math problem of converting between keyframe sequences containing simultaneous rotations and translations between different euler orders. It's probably easy (eulers -> matrix -> other eulers), but currently i don't have to do this at all!

(also y-up is unholy)
hokomoko
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Re: Ludum Dare 33

Post by hokomoko »

Anarchid wrote:I was able to do all the animations i did for for gravitas and area17 from a single attempt without having to reload Spring (or /luarules reloads scripts to test hand-coded params) even once.
In animating the UFO I did have to reload some stuff, but it's only half relevant.
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FLOZi
MC: Legacy & Spring 1944 Developer
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Re: Ludum Dare 33

Post by FLOZi »

Why Flozi mad? I think there was some misunderstanding on his part that we switched fully to .dae/blender for the compo, but that was the format we used most during Gravitas too.
More to do with how the decision was made rather than the decision itself; even then it was done in a totally sensible way for LD, but its not how I am used to dealing with disagreements and it cheesed me off. More than likely because I was super grouchy having stayed up so late to find out the theme, not getting enough sleep then having strong coffee.

At the end of the day I didn't feel I was really bringing anything to the table anyway.
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smoth
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Re: Ludum Dare 33

Post by smoth »

Anarchid wrote:(also y-up is unholy)
Everything else in spring, y is up, so that is why I am so frustrated by z is up only on models and(now) animations, if you use dae.
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code_man
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Re: Ludum Dare 33

Post by code_man »

Doesnt collada allow specification which way is up?

I have

Code: Select all

<up_axis>Y_UP</up_axis>
in mine, but i never tried changing those.
In any case i dont think that scripts should make a difference what format the model is in.
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