Join us on Twitter and IRC (#ludumdare on Afternet.org) for the Theme Announcement!

Thanks everyone for coming out! For the next 3 weeks, we’ll be Playing and Rating the games you created.You NEED ratings to get a score at the end. Play and Rate games to help others find your game.We’ll be announcing Ludum Dare 36’s August date alongside the results.

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They will want awesome quests to set them on their way. Thrilling battles with ferocious baddies. And after they’ve slain the beasts they will have many a trinket and treasure, so make sure there’s a shop nearby where they can sell their bounty.

Your boss said you have complete control over the MMO World. Huzzah! There was one *tiny* limitation however: because of “technical reasons” it needed to fit on a single screen.

Ah, my first LD. It was awesome, I’m definitely hyped for doing it again. I’ve been meaning to do one for awhile but there was always something getting in the way. This time I had been learning Unity for 2-3 weeks and with a free weekend ahead of me and an itch to make something fun, I jumped all in.

I wanted to do a SIM / tactical game, where you didn’t have direct controls over the player. I decided to go for a defence style game, but instead of the usual defence turrets, you spawned AI controlled characters (Pirates, Yaargh!) to fight for you.

Dead men tell no tales

The good:

Was able to get it into a fully playable “finished” state

Really pleased with how the visuals turned out considering the problems I ran into with animations and sprite sheets (see below)

Has been well received in the reviews, thanks!

Love how the boat rocks in the background, I was actually playing around with random values trying to align my camera when I noticed the cool effect rotate was having. I was able to code up a quick script to get the boat rocking in about 5 minutes.

Put the 3 weeks of unity tutorials I had been doing into solid practice.

The bad:

As many of you can relate, I had too many ideas and ultimately had to cut many of them out to get it done in time.

There were some critical gameplay elements missing:

Able to upgrade the pirates – this would have added a whole new level of gameplay

Different enemy types – all the code was done for 3 more different types. Some flying enemies poisoned you, others were like bosses with high hit points and damage. I didn’t have time to do the visuals though, quite gutted about that!

Music – Even something simple would have added much in terms of immersion

UI / Interface – again, ran out of time.

Struggled with Unity’s animation system – I just didn’t have any experience with it, it slowed me down quite a bit on the Sunday

Ran into problems with image / sprite sheet resolution – again, due to lack of experience with Unity this took up alot of Sunday’s time.

The difficulty balance is whack. Unless you know what you’re doing, the first 7 waves are brutal. If you make it past that you pretty much have unlimited cash and barely a chance of dying. Still, it’s quite fun steam rolling everything in sight, kinda feels like you just trained the baddest ass Pirates the world has ever seen.

The future:

I’m pretty sure I’m going to continue working on it. It’s quite far from how I imagined it, so with a little luck and a big push I’ll get it there. I’ll post again if there are any updates or you can follow me @aaronjbaptiste and i’ll keep you posted there.