I with my brother participated on Ludum Dare for the first time. I have to say it was a ton of fun! Theme of 32nd Ludum Dare was “An Unconventional Weapon”. We created game “Lethal Throw”.  It has many features, which I done for the first time.

Plan was simple, create game as fast as possible. We started working at 8 pm on Saturday. We wanted to finish it at approximately 6 am on Sunday. You probably know how these plans turn out.

I wanted to make game controlled by gamepad. I was thinking how to use it. One of idea was to control two character at once, each by one stick, like in Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons. One of the next ideas was throwing a ball between these two characters, and trying to hit enemies with it. I thing that it went quite well luckily.

Next thing to consider was game’s theme. We wanted to create something little bit crazy. Probably because of “True Survivor” video, which one of my friend shared on Facebook, we chose 80’s stylization full of neon lights, lasers and cyber space.

Working was quite fine. I had some experience with Unity engine, which we use, but some things I was learning on the fly, but nothing impossible. I just did not believe, that we will able to make it. It is completely normal for me. So I asked my brother to hit me every time, when I say such bullshit. I was not necessary :D. We listened to game soundtrack from YouTube to stay focused. I would recommend Rayman Legends OST. It is absolutely brilliant.

We was almost finished at about 4 am. My brother even wrote it on Twitter. But than strange thing happened. We were working, but it looked like we were not progressing. It was probably because we very quite tired at that time, and also as many say last ten percents of work on game takes ninety percents of time. This rule was absolutely true at our case.

Plan to finish game to 6 am was ruined. We did not want to throw everything away after all we did, so we continued. Game was finished at 4 pm at Sunday, which was ten hours later than we expected. It was first time, when I did not sleep at night. I worked at night, but went sleep at motning. Not this time.

I wrote, that I tried many things for the first time at beginning of article. For the first time I implemented animations in Unity. It was not so easy as I expected. There are animation and animator component and I was confused about that. Mainly because I was doing it at morning when I was almost without energy. So I probably didn’t use common and entirely right solution. But it worked and it was all that matter at that time.

For the first time I created game that works with gamepad. I must say, it is great! It feels almost as console game. It is one of my dream to make game for console. This has just one negative. Game supports only Xbox 360 gamepad, and only on Windows. On other platforms it does not works.

And for the first time I make game working in web browser and on Mac OS. I seems to me as completely nonsense, because I don’t have Mac and I was not able to test it. But I was asked for it, so I make it. And it supposedly works. Web version is great, because literally everybody can try it without any complications. I would recommend it to everybody, if it is possible for your game.

I posted Lethal Throw on Facebook. My friends told me that it was fun game, when I met them. It was for the first time when someone who I now said, that my game was good. My brother played it with his friends on computer class on next Monday. And they had fun. It was like miracle for me.

There are also thinks, which I would like to change. Most annoying are sound, especially sound of dying bugs. Algorithm for generating enemies is also not ideal. It increases difficulty too slowly. Bugs shooting needs also some improvement.

Ludum Dare voting will end in two days. Than we will see, how well we did. It looks positive so far. If it is not flop, we will probably polish and improve game.

I would like to thank to my brother for doing graphic. He did well job even that it was his first completed game.

I will write another blog definitely, when I will now results. Don’t forget to try out game and write, how you like it.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/19747618/HTML5/index.html

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