Game Description
A puzzle game where the player uses various goblins to reach the goal. Each goblin has a unique ability that can clear a path toward the goal. With a combination of sending goblins in the right combination and at the right time any puzzle can be solved.
Before Ludum Dare 33
A Week of Planning
Each day before Ludum Dare, Paul and I voted for new topics along with the other participants. After 4 days of online voting, 80 different themes were reduced down to the top 20. Out of the twenty Paul and I created different game ideas for the many different topics, and while most were unique for each topic, some game ideas overlapped into other topics.
You can see our brainstorm page: here.
Getting Ready
The night before the Game Jam started we were pretty nervous since all of our previous game projects had taken months to complete at any given time. To calm our nerves and keep us busy we watched a few unity tutorials in 2D game development and fully committed to only making 2D games for the Ludum Dare (mainly because I was the Artist and could only draw pixel art in a timely fashion)
Things we had before the start
By the time we started working on the game at 6:00pm we had two things setup beforehand: A tilemap editor tweaked and made more accessible from something I found online here, and the unity sample Game Jam Menu Template which I would heavily alter during the game jam.
Challenges
The first disappointment
At the very beginning of the game jam our team ran into a problem; we didn’t like the theme. Before the Ludum Dare we created a list of games we hoped would not be chosen and in center stage was “You are the monster”. Looking back we really only disliked it because we had no idea what we wanted to make that would fit the theme. We eventually decided to make a game where you played the Slasher villain in a Horror Movie. We would soon find out that this would lead to a long night of headaches and hardships.
Our first and last game disagreement
Before this project I never knew what Paul’s opinion on horror games was. Because of this we had a small dispute on the goriness of our game and how sadistic the player could be while playing the slasher film villain. I enjoy horror games and films to a high degree and really wanted to capture the feeling of torturing a bunch of college kids as they visit your haunted lakeside cabin. In my vision of the game you would of been able to kill the campers one by one and be able to display their bodies for the other campers to find. These scare tactics would build up a fear meter and have the campers perform less intelligently and make it easier for them to fall into traps.
Paul on the other hand wanted a game where you simply tried to scare the kids off your island in nonviolent ways, where once the campers scare meter reached a certain point they would run away. Eventually we called it a night once we had campers simply running away from the player back and forth across our map.
Cutting our losses
The next morning we decided to cut our losses and scrape the current idea, since we both knew we did not like the current direction of the game. We had 2.5 days left and wanted to make the most of it. So we headed back to the drawing board and found another game idea that we really wanted to make into a game and also fit the theme… a little bit. We thought at the time that our goblin characters were going to be much more villainous than they are in the final product.
Unity physics and interaction with gameplay
After we got the ball rolling for the goblins game we found a few problems with movement and collisions. The biggest problem was that our character’s movement was completely physics based. We solved the problem with tiny tweaks and adding weird physics forces that would slow down or speed up the goblins whenever they needed to move up or down ramps.
Looking back I wished we had done our movement with a tile based movement system. Where a goblin would move to the right tile if it was free and stay in place if it was occupied. Then when a goblin did move to another tile it would be transitioned to that tile with Unity’s Lerp system or some other form of procedural movement. I feel this would of gotten rid of a lot of our headaches that came from making a puzzle game with physics based movement, that didn’t have physics based puzzles.
What went right
What could've been improved
Looking toward the future
Data Box
Developer: The Cat’s Pajamas
Publisher: Ludum Dare/Itch.io
Release Date: October 22, 2015
Platforms: Windows and Web
Game Link: Goblins
Ludum Dare Link: Goblins
Team Size: 3
Length of Development: 3 days
Lines of Code: 1248
Development Tools: Unity 5.1, Visual Studio 2013, Pickle, BFXR, Audacity, 2D Tile Mapper by Jules Girodon
Asset Resources: Free Music Archive, AudioMicro, freesound.org, YouTube Audio Library
Credits
Designers:
Paul Schwarzwalder
Phoenix Smith
Programmers:
Paul Schwarzwalder
Phoenix Smith
Artist:
Phoenix Smith
Level Designers:
Jami Schwarzwalder
Phoenix Smith
Paul Schwarzwalder
A puzzle game where the player uses various goblins to reach the goal. Each goblin has a unique ability that can clear a path toward the goal. With a combination of sending goblins in the right combination and at the right time any puzzle can be solved.
Before Ludum Dare 33
A Week of Planning
Each day before Ludum Dare, Paul and I voted for new topics along with the other participants. After 4 days of online voting, 80 different themes were reduced down to the top 20. Out of the twenty Paul and I created different game ideas for the many different topics, and while most were unique for each topic, some game ideas overlapped into other topics.
You can see our brainstorm page: here.
Getting Ready
The night before the Game Jam started we were pretty nervous since all of our previous game projects had taken months to complete at any given time. To calm our nerves and keep us busy we watched a few unity tutorials in 2D game development and fully committed to only making 2D games for the Ludum Dare (mainly because I was the Artist and could only draw pixel art in a timely fashion)
Things we had before the start
By the time we started working on the game at 6:00pm we had two things setup beforehand: A tilemap editor tweaked and made more accessible from something I found online here, and the unity sample Game Jam Menu Template which I would heavily alter during the game jam.
Challenges
The first disappointment
At the very beginning of the game jam our team ran into a problem; we didn’t like the theme. Before the Ludum Dare we created a list of games we hoped would not be chosen and in center stage was “You are the monster”. Looking back we really only disliked it because we had no idea what we wanted to make that would fit the theme. We eventually decided to make a game where you played the Slasher villain in a Horror Movie. We would soon find out that this would lead to a long night of headaches and hardships.
Our first and last game disagreement
Before this project I never knew what Paul’s opinion on horror games was. Because of this we had a small dispute on the goriness of our game and how sadistic the player could be while playing the slasher film villain. I enjoy horror games and films to a high degree and really wanted to capture the feeling of torturing a bunch of college kids as they visit your haunted lakeside cabin. In my vision of the game you would of been able to kill the campers one by one and be able to display their bodies for the other campers to find. These scare tactics would build up a fear meter and have the campers perform less intelligently and make it easier for them to fall into traps.
Paul on the other hand wanted a game where you simply tried to scare the kids off your island in nonviolent ways, where once the campers scare meter reached a certain point they would run away. Eventually we called it a night once we had campers simply running away from the player back and forth across our map.
Cutting our losses
The next morning we decided to cut our losses and scrape the current idea, since we both knew we did not like the current direction of the game. We had 2.5 days left and wanted to make the most of it. So we headed back to the drawing board and found another game idea that we really wanted to make into a game and also fit the theme… a little bit. We thought at the time that our goblin characters were going to be much more villainous than they are in the final product.
Unity physics and interaction with gameplay
After we got the ball rolling for the goblins game we found a few problems with movement and collisions. The biggest problem was that our character’s movement was completely physics based. We solved the problem with tiny tweaks and adding weird physics forces that would slow down or speed up the goblins whenever they needed to move up or down ramps.
Looking back I wished we had done our movement with a tile based movement system. Where a goblin would move to the right tile if it was free and stay in place if it was occupied. Then when a goblin did move to another tile it would be transitioned to that tile with Unity’s Lerp system or some other form of procedural movement. I feel this would of gotten rid of a lot of our headaches that came from making a puzzle game with physics based movement, that didn’t have physics based puzzles.
What went right
- I enjoyed the lead up to the ludum dare more than I expected I would. On the last day we knew that 1 of the 20 final themes would be chosen and coming up with 20 different game ideas is a fun exercise in brainstorming. I can’t wait to do the process again because I feel it was the most fun I had during the event.
- After making a game every year from scratch during my college education, it was nice to work in a fully functional engine from the start. I had used Unity previously for a small project and with that all my previous experiences I was able to focus on making a great game and not worrying about what couldn’t be done or learning the ins and outs of the engine. Because of all these great benefits I believe I have created my best game to date.
- The core concept of our game came out great, it creates interesting puzzles and lets us expand very easily on what already exist. I enjoy the Lemmings style to the game and many of the Ludum Dare participants enjoyed it as well. I can’t wait to make additional level packs for the game that utilize the different goblins together in more unique ways.
- Every goblin we planned for the game was created and fully implemented. This provided our game a great amount of variety which kept each puzzle fresh and create a sense of accomplishment as levels progressed and players unlocked more goblins.
- After the Ludum Dare voting stage we found that the game was a pretty big hit with other players and we made it into the top 300 games out of 2000+ entries. For our first game in ludum dare I feel we did fairly well. Our scores can be seen below and we hope that next Ludum Dare we can break into the top 100.
- Another great accomplishment that I was able to complete during Ludum Dare is the creation of a intuitive and fast level editor for our level design. Without this tool our game would of been half the size it is and we may not of even had enough levels to feature our individual goblins. I give great thanks to Kaisirak for a great template to work off of.
What could've been improved
- In the future I would like to make the level editor from scratch so I can get a better sense of how to make better Unity editor tools. With more knowledge on making custom Unity editors I can make future projects much more streamlined for my designers and for myself.
- During this Ludum Dare we didn’t have a team wide account, which made it impossible for all our team members to vote on games they found interesting. In the future we plan on having a team accounts for everything, from Ludum Dare to email and hopefully a twitter account too.
- One thing I regretted us not having on day 1 was a desktop version of the game on day one. we were able to get a desktop version up in the next two days, but this setback was due more to our busy schedules rather than a lack of knowledge.
- Unfortunately on this project, a lot of my work output had to be funneled into art rather than coding and because of this I was not able to program as many things as I would have liked for the game. Next time I hope that we can find an artist to mitigate this and allow me to program more and draw less.
- People really needed a tutorial for our game and unfortunately time prevented us from even adding a simple textbox style tutorial. Next time I will try to save time near the middle of the project to insert a tutorial.
- One big problem we didn’t find out until the very end of the project is all of our menus did not work at different resolution sizes. Not testing this was one of our biggest set backs as it meant we needed to go through every single level and change menu options because of some desyncing that had happened with the menu prefabs. In all future projects I am making it a priority to test all menus and UI on different resolutions before pushing a build.
Looking toward the future
- In the future I would like to port Goblins to a mobile version. While working on making Goblins a mobile game, I would like to polish the game for a final release. Within the final release I would like to add the following features:
- adding tutorials
- working a UI to reflect Mobile input
- Restructuring levels
- adding ads and developing for android market release (this one is for the learning experience of how the mobile market and ads work)
Data Box
Developer: The Cat’s Pajamas
Publisher: Ludum Dare/Itch.io
Release Date: October 22, 2015
Platforms: Windows and Web
Game Link: Goblins
Ludum Dare Link: Goblins
Team Size: 3
Length of Development: 3 days
Lines of Code: 1248
Development Tools: Unity 5.1, Visual Studio 2013, Pickle, BFXR, Audacity, 2D Tile Mapper by Jules Girodon
Asset Resources: Free Music Archive, AudioMicro, freesound.org, YouTube Audio Library
Credits
Designers:
Paul Schwarzwalder
Phoenix Smith
Programmers:
Paul Schwarzwalder
Phoenix Smith
Artist:
Phoenix Smith
Level Designers:
Jami Schwarzwalder
Phoenix Smith
Paul Schwarzwalder