Troll Away AR Ludum Dare 30
Last weekend we have made game for Ludum Dare, for 72h Jam.
Gameplay:
Submission:
Postmortem
I have been thinking about idea for game themed connected world. I was considering platformer with switchable environment but in the late evening of first day I came up with craziest idea I ever had at jams. Let's connect real world with virtual.
Augmented Reality
Three weeks ago I had made just a model viewer in Unity for android with Qualcomm Vuforia. I have had read that it is possible to track multiple markers and I was learning on the run how this library works. It turned out that it is quite simple and Vuforia takes care of heavy lifting. I have found by chance during video chat that you can debug in editor also on Unity Basic. It was extremely helpeful. Library is for mobiles and thus I do not had access to iOS device we created only Android build.
Multiplayer
I thought that connecting devices to each other would allow to keep track of more markers. It turned out that game could be played with just 2 and you cannot cheat. Multiplayer was done all with Unity components and Master Server. It was done at first because it was easier to test on PC before building to mobile with AR. Class structure was inspired by Unreal Engine and took me about 5-8h to create from scratch and debug. Game at this point was mumbling to console rather than having any visuals but we had tool to create gameplay.
Gameplay
I was inspired by tabletop wargames and frankly I had only vague idea. For sure characters were supposed to be moving to markers RTS like. Last jams day evening after messing around with movement, we simplified to make it snooker like. Bonus in green area was to bring your characters closer to the marker.
Graphics
2D art for GUI was made by Kozun. Models and animations are free assets from Unity Asset Store. There have been made scripts by Necromac that handles animation transitions and stuff and left simple interface for hooking it up to gameplay. Now I see that animations play only at server since just transform is replicated.
Sound
Our game lacks sound and our sound skills are low. Videos need some more love too. There is place for many improvements.
Timelapse:
In the hindsight I think that technical challenge was completed but there is place to improve gameplay, graphics and overall appeal. Since we have not been working all day straight next time will make better use of timeframe. We have gameplay and we can together test if it is really fun and that is IMHO most important.
You can read it also on ludum dare site:
Comments
Post a Comment