Ludum Dare 38 Entry!

Well I have recovered enough from the weekend to do a quick post about Ludum Dare 38. This was an interesting entry as I was planning on entering the jam (72 hours to make a game) instead of the compo (48 hours to make a game). But I did it! My first compo and my first 3D Unity game!

My brother came up with the name: Snail Away. The theme was "A Small World". My first thought was to make a 2D Mario Galaxy like game with small planets with gravity. Luckily I didn't do this as sooooo many other people created a game along those lines.

Instead I made a basic infinite runner (or flyer I guess). You glide around as a snail under a leaf while trying to avoid obstacles. The idea was that the snail was to slow, but attaching itself to a leaf, it discovered it could get around a lot faster.

Everything was made during the event. I did run out of time to add variety to the generation but I'm planning on doing an updated post-LD version of the game (including an Android port) that will add more generation as well as coins to collect to make the game more interesting. Here are a couple more screenshots (note: in one shot it says made in 72 hours, I fixed that but didn't update the screenshot):



So as I said before this was my first "real" 3D game made with Unity. Up until this point I had just messed around with a couple of projects but never did anything seriously. I started this game jam by modeling the leaf and some terrain in Blender. After setting up a simple movement script I had a extremely basic prototype of a game. At this point I was enjoying the game and the scope was at least plausible. Modeling more objects and adding it to the project, I started to realize there wasn't any real gameplay but it was still fun in a relaxing sort of way. I went with this casual game-style and added some graphic shaders to soften the graphics and emphasize the colors.

The UI was an issue (there is a bug that will screw up the menus if the resolution is not a specific size). However, TextMeshPro helped a lot to make a more visually appealing menu.

Last but not least was music. I never got to sound effects but I figured music was a must to create the meditative sort of mood to the game. Now, I'm no musician. I asked around a bit on some game-dev communities but there wasn't gonna be time for anything good. Luckily I stumbled across jukedeck.com. This site randomly generates music based on equations and algorithms. I was pleasantly surprised by the quality and the fact that the music was free to use (as long as you give them credit of course).

I had a great time during this Ludum Dare and I am pretty pleased with the game I came up with. I tweeted most of my development progress and you can follow me @CoderJoe99. Here are some more development pics/gifs:


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