This weekend I participated in Ludum Dare for the first time, and I wanted the hardcore experience of doing all assets by myself, in 48 hours. It was awesome.

First of all, if you want to play the game you can find it in GameJolt or in LudumDare.

Even before I started jamming I was already thinking on making a game about boreal caribou, simply because it is related to my Geography Master’s Thesis. The theme of Ludum Dare 40, however, is: “the more you have the worse it is”.

I quickly came up with a concept where you must lead caribou to a safe zone. However, the larger your group gets the harder it becomes to avoid wolves and other hazards.

In this post I’ll present all the nerdy statistics of my experience and make some comments on my performance.

I made an approximate time sheet of all the different activities I did during this game jam. The most time consuming activities include: Sleeping, Programming, Level Design and Modelling.

Even though I had considerable sleep time I still felt very tired at the end from overworking. During the first day I was focused on programming and during the second day I was focused on level design.

Modelling and animating was a lot of fun and didn’t take as long as I thought it would. I ended up reutilizing a lot of stuff to save time. For instance, first I modelled the caribou and then I modified it to turn it into the wolf.

Interestingly, the organic models (Caribou, Wolf) ended up with half as much polygons as the inorganic (bulldozer, truck) models. I would’ve thought initially that the opposite would be the case.

I am very satisfied with how the final scene looks like, despite a few details I would’ve fixed if I had more time. It feels like a good prototype or 1st stage for a game.

There are about 16 thousand trees in this scene, and they were placed using a simple tool I developed during the jam. I really wanted the trees to be individual entities since I was adamant on the idea of a bulldozer tearing down corridors in the forest.

Aside from the trees, there are about 100 other significant objects in the scene, including 26 caribou, 9 wolves, 12 trucks, 6 bulldozers, and 10 “downable” trees.

The most complex scripts I coded were: Enemy/Ally AI (spotting, following, attacking, jumping); player input and interactions with environment; and the tree “block” placement tool I mentioned above.

Over the course of the 48 hours I coded 1059 lines of C# script, modelled a total of 3732 triangles, composed a bit over 7 minutes of music, and ended up with a scene containing 32,962 entities.

This has been a very valuable experience. In the beginning I was not sure I’d be able to do all this by myself in only two days. Now I look forward to participate in other Ludum Dare events in the future!