Last weekend, I took part in the 15th Ludum Dare games programming contest. The idea behind Ludum Dare is to create a game from scratch in 48 hours. I’d entered the previous one, and had used Python to create a bit of a non-game called Giant Laser of Doom.
My entry this year, Cavern Copter, was a simple 3d game in which you, the player, flew a helicopter around in a cave saving scientists from the rising floodwaters.
What went right?
I used Unity 3d. I only recently bought Unity and was looking for a quick project to try out what I’d learned, so a short, time-boxed competition like Ludum Dare was ideal. I won’t go into details, but Unity makes terrain creation, collision detection and physics very easy, as they’re all part of the engine.
The idea was sound. It took me the best part of the first day to come up with an idea. The contest theme, Caverns, was announced at 4am local time. I logged on around 9am to see what it was, wrote it down, then went out for the morning, taking with me a pen and a piece of paper. Any time I had an idea, no matter how stupid, I wrote it down. When I finally got a chance to sit down at my laptop, I then gave myself a deadline to play around with Unity to try out some of the better ideas. After a couple of hours I chose to go with the idea that would eventually become Cavern Copter.
I was brutal with my time. Often when I write a game, I take time to explore ideas and techniques, because it’s just as interesting to play with the idea as it is to implement it. However, that doesn’t help me to get things done and it’s just not practical when you only have 48 hours to deliver a working game. As a result, if I had an idea that wasn’t core to the game or was a nice-to-have, then unless I could implement it quickly I abandoned it. For example, the helicopter was originally going to land and pick up the scientists, Choplifter style, but after about half an hour of playing with that idea, I canned it and kept the helicopter at a fixed height.
What went wrong?
The controls. I wish I’d spent more time tuning the controls. Helicopters aren’t meant to be easy to fly, so I made sure that the game was playable all the way through, tweaking the terrain layout where I thought it was too narrow. However, although I could play it, it seems that a lot of reviewers found it very difficult to control. Given that there were 143 other entries submitted, in retrospect I think it was probably a bit unfair to ask the reviewers to spend time getting to grips with the controls.
I didn’t get everything done. Despite being brutal with my time, I still spent too long on some features. As a result, the GUI was completely hacked in at the last minute and I was unable to implement sound effects or music.
Where to get it
Download the latest version of Cavern Copter from here:
- Download Cavern Copter for Windows
- Download Cavern Copter for Mac (Intel)
- Download Cavern Copter for Mac (PPC)
- Play Cavern Copter online (Unity web player)
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