As part of Ludum Dare 40, ‘The Dungeon Adventures of Greedy’ was created along the theme of “The more you have it, the worse it is”. The concept was to tie “coins” with your high score, but the more coins you collect, the louder you move and thus the easier it is to be noticed.
You can try out the game now on itch.io! Link
Download the source code via GitHUB
Role: Lead programmer and animator.
Engine: Unity
Date: 2nd December to 5th December, 2017
The jam was 72 hours long, and we were dead set on making sure we had a finished product. We pre-emptively formed a team of five people, three of whom were studying the Video Games Development course at the University of East London. This group consisted of:
- Two programmers (myself included)
- One design lead
- One sound designer
- One artist
The key for our success was keeping the code and hierarchy as neat as possible – as we had so many different scripts, bug hunting would have otherwise been a nightmare.
This concept was heavily inspired by “Demontower”, from “Night in the Woods”.
Learning Outcomes
- It was surprisingly tough, communicating remotely from our own personal workstations. Bug fixing was difficult, as, rather than pointing out your problems at the monitor, you had to describe how to recreate the bug and which lines you think are the problem, and why you think this is.
- Build as often as you can, when you can. We were almost unable to submit as it was taking hours to make a proper build (most likely due to the light maps).
- Sometimes, it’s just easier to hardcode animations into a script! (using transforms)
Reflection
- The project, for us at the time, was rather impressive, but it was far from perfect. In the end, we didn’t really hit the theme the way we wanted to.
- Some have reported that the limitations of attacks/dashes on a cooldown can make the game a bit frustrating to play. Others have said that they love it. Further playtesting is required.
- The hierarchy was an absolute nightmare to navigate at the beginning. Thankfully, we took the initiative on the second day to clean it up, but it was easy to get lost just trying to find what we wanted. For future game jams going forward, they will definitely benefit from that added 15 minutes just to make sure that there is a system in place that everyone else can follow and conform to.
What’s Next?
- More levels (each play session is about 15 minutes?)
- Consider procedural generation
- Revisit combat controls
Hoyung Ling 
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