Making a game in 1 day - 1 day game jam

Hey everyone! I decided to develop a game in a day to test my skills and see If I could replicate the pacifism mode from Geometry wars in a short amount of time. 

I used my Zelda inspired art assets from my Oracle Of Ages video and begun development! It went super smooth and I learned some cool tricks.

Setting velocity rather then add force
So usually I use Add Force for my games with VelocityChange and it's been pretty good. I did the same for Nobi Sword and got feedback about the movement feeling slippery. I decided to mess around with different movement methods and found using set velocity to be really nice. The movement feels instant and snappy making it responsive. 

You want your input to feel responsive, so from now on I'll be using Set velocity for games that require responsive player movement. 

Lighting
The standard shader with point lights is really great now! I had 4 point lights in the scene and each one only added around 2 - 4 set pass calls which was insane. This was for a windows desktop build, you won't have such luck with HTML5 as point lights are super expensive. 

Unity still need to fix light mapping as it dosen't have the results I desire but the point lights worked really well. In combination with the new particles I was able to have some really nice lighting/ VFX. I used little particles around the gravestones so they appeared like fire flies.

Game play feedback
I've read and heard a lot about everything in a game giving some form of feedback whether this is visual or audio. I decided to implement this and had it constantly on my mind, I wanted player feedback to be in all parts of my game. 

When a lantern spawns particles fly into the sky and the lantern has a light from it + particles emitting around it. When you pick up a lantern a blast of particles go off and any enemies they hit blast into particles which is really clear and fun feedback that you're destroying everything! I really enjoyed developing the game with this in mind and I hope you can see it when playing the game. I believe the giving player feedback so that their inputs in the game matter is super important! After all the player can only interact by pressing buttons on the screen, it should feel good when they do things such as picking up items or kill enemies.

Building a strong foundation
Now I know that this game is based off pacifism mode from geometry wars but by building this I have so many ideas to implement which would make the game my own. It's not a bad thing to use someones ideas as inspiration to develop something new. Now If i was to flat out just copy the game that would be another story, I want to move forward and take this game in my own direction. I really believe in the saying "Everything is a remix", you are limited by what you've experienced. Developing games inspired by works from all around the world is the way to go for me! 

From this point on I want to improve upon this game and turn it into something that has my unique approach to developing games stamped on it. I believe that truly great games stand out because there is nothing else like that game out there. Yes it could be an FPS game and there are a lot of FPS games out there but nothing is quite like Doom, or nothing is quite like Super hot. Just because your game is existing in a genre with certain design trends it doesn't mean you have to stick to them! Truly great games innovate within limitations and the common ones do not. 

I've been thinking about this topic for quite sometime so it's good to get it off my chest. Until the next blog post, enjoy playing my game :)