It’s that time of year once again. The time when US income taxes are due, the time when old man winter finally passes out in the middle of Ohio in a fit of drunken rage, and the time when I participate in the upcoming Ludum Dare.
Preparations are all just about made. My schedule for the weekend is clear, including the day before and after the competition. My rig and tools are ready to go, and I’m paying close attention to the theme voting.
Reviewing last year’s retrospective, I see two key areas to focus on for improvement: Game controls, and making sure to get to bed at a reasonable hour. Focusing on humor is also something that always serves me well, and will continue to be a goal. Maybe, hopefully, my inspiration this year will be for a 2D game, which would be less complex to pull off, though if I do go 3D, I’m going to try my hardest to use the stock CharacterControllers in Unity. That should help a lot with the controls.
If I do manage to keep it to 2D, maybe a WebGL build will be possible. If I do anything 3D, though, I’m not going to touch Unity’s WebGL deployment, which continues to disappoint even in Unity 5.3. At this point I’m left with the obsolete WebPlayer and downloadable .exe’s as distribution platforms. Not an optimal situation. At any rate, I could rant about that for a good long time; I’m still plenty sore at ALL players involved for rendering my older games inaccessible to many without providing a VIABLE path to move them forward.
Back to Ludum Dare… another reason I’d like to do a 2D project is that I just have not done a lot of it. Even for things that could be 2D like Breaking Block, I tended toward 3D. Chroma Invader from way-back-when was really the only serious 2D project I did. Hence my surprise when other developers tell me they stick to 2D because they fear the complexities of 3D. I’m kind of the opposite – I stick to 3D because I fear the complexities of 2D artwork, because I suck at drawing things that are not abstract. Ludum Dare is one of the places where abstract 2D can actually work well.
As always, I hope to do well, and have a blast while doing so. And create and release a new game.