Ludum Dare 38: Parking Zone

Read about my first participation in the Ludum Dare Game Jam.

Ludum Dare is a game jam/compo that happens three times every year. The jam lasts for 72 hours and the compo for 48 hours. There are different rules for the two categories.

This was my first time participating in the event, and I submitted my game to the compo. The most important rules of the compo are:

You have to work solo
Every asset in the game (code, graphics, sounds etc.) must be created by yourself during the 48 hours

“A small world”

The theme of LD38 was “A small world”. I decided to make the game take place on a regular living room table. Here’s a breakdown of the different 3D models I created for the game:

The room itself
An empty bookshelf that is just standing in the viewport
A table
A car
A trailer

I started with the table. It wasn’t too hard to make. I created a wood-like texture and mapped the texture to the table. The room and the bookshelf was easy to make.

The car.. I spent probably at least 30% of my time creating the car and the wheels. Once I was finished with that, I spent probably almost the same amount of time making the tires work as they should with Unity’s wheel collider. In the beginning they were rotated 90 degrees once the game started. After placing each individual wheel in an empty game object, everything was working. There is probably an easier way to do this, but I didn’t have time to figure it out.

The trailer was fairly simple to make in Blender. I attached it to a vehicle object in Unity and used a hinge joint to make the physics work more or less like in real life.

I’ve never used the wheel collider in Unity, and I spent a fair amount of time making it work as I wanted to. There are still a few things I have to work out, though. Right now I’m also applying torque to the trailer’s wheels, which doesn’t really make sense.

Tools

Here’s a breakdown of the different tools I used:

Unity
Blender
Audiotool.com (music)

Summary

It was a really fun and challenging experience. As a beginner with both Unity and Blender, I spent most of the time figuring out how to do some of the most basic things. Time spent in Blender was probably around 60%. I really wanted to spend more time making the game more exciting and fun to play, but I just couldn’t fit it in. I probably should have submitted to the jam, which would have given me 24 hours more to work with the game, but since I had other plans for the next day, I didn’t see any reason to do so.

I’m already looking forward to the next event.

Links

Ludum Dare entry
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/parking-zone

Source code
https://github.com/kimgrytoyr/LD38—Parking-Zone

Downloads