Development Blog (semi)random.thoughts()

LD42 entry post mortem

Just a quick post mortem of my Ludum Dare 42 entry "I'm TOTALLY not a clicker!": the game I made in honour of my collegue at work who hates idle clicker games.

gameplay


What went right


  • Clear intent: I knew what game I wanted to make and that's the game I made.
  • Number parsing: idle/clicker games are all about big numbers. I used floats almost everywhere in this game, but you don't see 1.21323e+6 on screen anywhere. Instead you see something like "1.21m";
  • Clicker Mechanics: Many of staples of clicker games are in here: everything becomes exponentially more expensive, you can buy upgrades, you get free gifts ("Lucky!"), numbers get bigger and bigger. Only missing is a secondary currency and IAP...


What went wrong


  • Procedurally generated music: at first I wanted the music to be generated by the blocks on screen. I.e. it's different every time because very rarely are the same blocks on screen at the same time. I built a prototype, but it just didn't sound interesting enough. I finally settled for creating a dedicated soundtrack in GarageBand;
  • Visual Variety: in the end, it's just cubes. And they don't really "pop" from the screen either. I was hoping for a more visually striking aesthetic, but ended up with something a little bland.


What have I learned


  • Unity Analytics: I just enabled the default Unity Analytics. This tracks only sessions and play time. Like, the average play time is ~150 seconds. I believe I can do more with this in the future to see for instance how far most players get in the game (is there a difficulty spike?);

unity_analytics

  • WebGL: the first WebGL build was fine. For the second one, suddenly all of my cubes were gone. After some trial and error and many rebuilds (which are very slow for WebGL), I found that the Post Processing stack in Unity 2018.2 is not compatible with WebGL. I had to revert to the old one. My lesson: start building sooner, because when the build result is not what you expect, it's easier to find the cause. To do so, next time I'll use Unity Collaborate with Cloud Build so I can do frequent builds, without disrupting my workflow.

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