Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → Barney Cumming
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Au | Hu | Mo | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2017 | 39 | Running out of Power | Sleepy Orphan Simulator | jam | 5 | 4.44 | 4.04 | 4.48 | 4.17 | 4.59 | 4.22 | 4.29 | 4.23 |
Thanks so much for the encouragement, so stoked to have people playing my silly game! I was very worried it would be too hard to explain the controls and people would give up before they got the hang of it!!
@junber so great to hear you played it through and won over all but 1 adult! I was worried people wouldn't get the hang of charming them as i didn't tutorialize it very well- didn't really explain how you have to move about and be in the right proximity etc.
As for getting it done in 3 days, it was a very close call haha :) The cutoff time here (Australia) was 11am Tuesday morning, and I didn't get the mechanics/art done to start making levels til 10pm Monday night! I was up til 4am making levels, then went to bed for 3 hours til my girlfriend had to get up for work at 7, when I got back up to record sound effects! Really the thing that saved me was doing the environments all in flat color silhouette, so I could make new levels with no new art, just moving and scaling around more grey collision rectangles!
Very happy it all came together in the end and I didn't miss any major elements. Probably the biggest things I missed were doing animation on the boys legs, and having some kind of propper scene when you finish the game... it was so late and I was so tired by then I just grabbed a bunch of the food and put it up in the sky so it would fall on you hahah but not much of a finale really! I had big dreams of having different story scenes depending on how many adults you won over etc but it was not to be! I would have loved some special "end of the game" fun music for that final level too, as contrast from the background sounds of the rest of the game :)
Thanks again everyone :)
@Skydsgaard - I'm pretty keen on learning to code, at least enough to aid design/prototyping/technical art etc! It all had to fall by the wayside while we were chasing deadlines for Crawl, so it has been great to get stuck into it again since launch- LD was at a perfect opportunity to test out the stuff I've been learning :)
@everythingWasBees - I know what you mean about the controls- I did initially have W,A,S and D mapped to the body parts, but something about switching and moving on separate hands wound up confusing me all the time! Definitely will be fun to experiment a bit more with control schemes now the time pressure is off- it would be cool to work multiple body parts at once as long as it didn't get too confusing.
@Yetman - Thanks so much :) definitely a good point about the platforms! As they get higher on the screen they get less and less contrast against the background gradient... I imagine people with even slightly less screen contrast than me might not be able to see them at all- oops!
@Gumboot - So good to hear! To be honest, there was about a 95% chance I'd get caught up on some unsolvable physics bug for half a day and never get the game done in time- very lucky the Unity physics gods were behaving at least for 72 hours!
@peter-sheehan - Stoked with that feedback dude :) definitely the music is the main thing I've had complaints about. At 3am it seemed like a totally hilarious idea to just record myself saying orphanage over and over, but it's definitely a bit of a weird joke that misses for a lot of people! I think a big part of what's funny on my end is just that it's my dumb voice, which of course doesn't translate so well haha!
@rotblade - I wouldn't call it singing hehe but it is my voice saying orphanage :) It's slowed down a bit too.
@Fran Segura - lol if I could like that comment twice I would :) sorry for leaving the setting so ambiguous! hehe
@jaimuepe - hehe thanks! Definitely "character able to eat bricks" would be a selling point for me if I saw it on the back of a game box :)