I have tried to participate in Ludum Dare several times, but I have always either given up or skipped it due to not liking the theme. There was one year where I did technically “complete” a “game”, but the assets were terrible and I wasn’t very proud of it.
At first I didn’t really like the theme and wasn’t sure I’d even attempt it, but somehow I ended up coming up with something that I felt satisfied the theme enough and was interesting enough for me to work on.
This was a much more ambitious project than any other attempt. I decided to do mine in 3d, and I have only started doing any sort of 3d modeling earlier this week. I used blockbench, which is a really simple modeling tool. It was pretty approachable for someone who has never used it before. I watched a single tutorial on youtube and then I was able to figure out what I needed to do by just using what I understood about meshes and UVs.
This was also my first attempt at creating a first person camera and a shooter. I was able to figure most of the math out myself using the Godot Basis class.
I’m glad I persevered and actually finished it. I learned a lot about the Godot engine and had a great time. The first time I had the enemy meshes explode I was ecstatic. I was shocked that something so simple looked good enough for me to keep it in the final version.
The code is up on github. It’s not the best code I’ve written. There are few classes that are too large and should be broken out (i.e. Player). The UI code and structure leaves a lot to be desired. And I really wish I had put in a volume slider.
I also wish I would have tested it more with the HTML player version since that’s the most likely way to get people to try the game out for the challenge itself. I have some lagging issues due to poor scene loading strategies. I was taking advantage of my PCs hardware, and that proved to be a mistake.
All in all, it was a great experience, and while there is a lot I could have done better I am proud of it. It’s a 48-hour challenge after all, so I can’t expect it to have everything a finished product would have.
I may go back and do some refactoring and introduce some object pooling to see if that resolves some of the issues.
This was a truly rewarding and worthwhile use of my time.
