#DoYouEvenLiftBro?
Ludum Dare 37 just passed and unlike previous jams, I'm not one bit tired from the weekend-long gamedev marathon! I guess I could factor in and say that it was all because I came into the jam with high-creative adrenaline pumping. Mentioned earlier in the previous blog post, my game design partner, Barry and I were feeling a little burnt-out from working on our GalaxSeed project for nearly a year, and we were eager and excited to channel our creativity onto something new for a change. With the help of Nathan H. on sound (who is currently helping us with music and sound effects on GalaxSeed, and who could possibly be a new Roaring Cat Games member, "Noise Cat", as he may liked to be formally titled), we became a three-cats team covering the main basis of game development: Programming, Art, and Sound. The high-creative adrenaline also served as a double-edge sword for me, I was overly ambitious to create new artwork in this game jam that did not manage my time properly. Scope was my biggest problem. I literally wrote down 100+ art assets to create in Trello, but only managed check off about 25% off of the list. I had ran into two obstacles early on that took most of my time. One was drawing out the house to match the artstyle of the character, a flat vector in black contour style rendered in Illustrator; the second problem was animating the character, my gosh, you wouldn't believe how difficult it was to animate a character with short legs walking and doing random movements! I had the hardest time finding the pivot point for where the knees should be because of his super, short legs. Once those those problems were tackled though, it was smooth sailing with art assets creation, but we quickly ran out of time and so, our game lacked a lot of assets that could have made it even more enjoyable. Also, for the first time EVER, Barry was ahead of me in coding, as I was trailing a distant behind in art.
Our game is called, Junk in the Bunk, and it's a game where you play the role of a doomdsay prepper that has just finished his bunker. Unfortunately, a meteor is already on its way, and you have to rush to fill your bunker with the supplies you want with you through the end of the world!
You can grab a couple screen shot previews here before moving on over to Ludum Dare's website to play it.
**Post Edit**
The results are in! And here's how we ranked out of 1489 Jam Entries! The last number is the amount of stars out of a possible 5*.
#73 Humor 3.81*
#219 Graphics 4.00*
#281 Innovation 3.41*
#291 Fun 3.41*
#301 Audio 3.30*
#348 Theme 3.74*
#420 Mood 3.31*
#421 Overall 3.37*
I wish I had planned better before diving into art creation. I felt like our fun category could have been much higher if there were more things to throw around, but what can you do? Scope has always been the biggest factor.
