At the Danish game jam
Indie 9000 this weekend we were three level designers using FPSC. This is a small feedback on how the process went and what went right and wrong. Download links for the game will be posted in the showcase section as soon as possible.
This was the first time that we used FPSC, so a lot of the things mentioned here are probably pretty basic. Also, none of us are coders, so we only used stuff that we could do without scripting.
What went right?
Developing on three computers simultaneously: with only to days to develop this allowed us to get levels done quickly since we could work on levels and share them easily. Setting up a network drive for sharing would have speeded things up even more.
Basic lighting: we wanted the feel of a dark survival horror game – and I think we found it. The static lighting of FPSC is simple but efficient. It took some time to find out how to disable ambient lighting but once that was gone everything worked.
Dynamic lighting: we only used this in level 1 but it was both enjoyable to make and see it working with a light switch inside the game.
Combining elements from several model packs into the levels. Having bought a lot of the official model packs dictated that they also should be used. The story helped us here when we put a modern day team of scientists doing research in the tomb of a pharaoh. This allowed us to use many of the modern day packs along with the superb (!!!) model packs 8 and 17.
Keyboard shortcuts: couldn't do it without them!
What went wrong?
Crash bug due to one level ending on an elevator. This one took hours to track down and I still think we got lucky. Level 2 ended on an elevator and this caused a crash when level 3 was nearly done loading. Only through intensive testing did we find the solution and got our player of the elevator before ending the level.
Rotating ammunition: we decided to use the weapons from model pack 9 in the game but most of the ammunition is floating and rotating in mid air. This doesn’t exactly look good in a game supposed to be scary and horrible. We never found a solution to this.
Broken Anubis? Model pack 17 has two types of Anubis figures. One is a statue and one comes alive when getting too close to it. This should have been used for surprising the player but when ever we made a real build of our game all the live Anubis figures were positioned up in the air. That made it impossible to surprise the player in any way. This did not happen with any other type of Egyptian character from that model pack.
Title page images are not treated all that nice: the images for the title page were the last thing to be made. It was done in a hurry, so we might have missed something, but all our images are made really ‘pixelated’ when put into the game. It is like way too much compression is used. On top of that the mouse in the main menu leaves a trail of itself when moved. Very strange indeed!
Conclusion
We are very pleased with the result of the game. Making five levels in a short weekend were more than I had expected and I’m looking forward to making more FPSC games. Especially FPSC X10 games when more model packs are supported.
If any of you have questions about the game or maybe solutions for some of the problems described please post
(image from level 2 is attached to this post)