Category Lemma

The Poor Man's Postmortem - Lemma

The big secret of our industry is, we don't actually enjoy making games. We slave away in obscurity for years in anticipation of one glorious day.

Not release day, no. The day we can finally write a postmortem full of pretentious anecdotes, bad jokes, and unsolicited advice.

Well I just finished a game, and doggone it, I am going to exercise my inalienable rights as a developer.

Lemma is immersive first-person parkour in a surreal, physics-driven voxel world.

Things to do when making a game

Ancient gamedev postmortem traditions mandate that this section be titled "what went right". Unfortunately, the game was so shockingly good and so many things went right that a full overview would stretch on endlessly.

The Poor Man's Character Controller

Let's say that, like so many of us, you want to make a surreal voxel-based first-person parkour game. You're trying to figure out a production schedule. What will take the longest? Graphics? Sound? Level design? I bet it will be the character controller. And I bet it will take 4½ years. Why?

  • In running/jumping games, player movement is paramount. It takes forever to nail the right feeling.
  • Each game is a unique snowflake. You will not find an article explaining how to design the controls for your specific game. You're flying blind.

That said, each game offers a few transferrable bits of wisdom. Here's my story.

Screenshot Saturday 213

It's the end of February and this game is supposed to be content-complete. In a sense, it actually is. All the levels are done. Twenty in all. I thought this month would never end!

Just so you know, there are sixty of those lights and I had to hook up each one individually. It fell just barely beneath the "worth it to automate" threshold.

Don't look too closely at this next one, it's a bit spoilery.

The Poor Man's Voxel Engine

This is not a tutorial. It's a story. A Voxel Odyssey.

The story starts with 19 year old me in a dorm room next to the Ohio State stadium. I don't have the repo from this stage of development (SVN at the time), but I remember the process clearly.

Photo by Kristen Sutton

XNA 4 comes out in September 2010. I immediately dive in. This turns out to be a poor life decision.

Screenshot Saturday 211

Last Saturday we had the Short North gallery hop. Hundreds of people came through our gallery to see art. The guys helped me set up the Oculus and a projector on the wall.

Sometimes I had to go out and pull people in, but most of the time, there was a line. My favorite customer by far was this kid:

He jumped right in and played like a pro. The mother (recording video) was super supportive and excited.

Screenshot Saturday 210

I finished last week's map. It has some spinny things.

Then I made this week's map.

Who knew purple and green could look so... not terrible?

Anyway, this puts me ahead of schedule. There are three levels remaining. My goal is to for the game to be playable from start to finish by the end of February. It's ambitious, but I'm confident I can do it!

Screenshot Saturday 209

This week was crazy productive. I finished last week's level, finished another level, which looks like this:

...which also included some story-related writing and scripting, and actually started working on NEXT week's level, which looks like this:

I seem to be on a purple streak lately. Actually, purple may rise unintentionally to be the most prominent color in the game. Also, this last level is apparently a subconscious ode to Monument Valley.

Screenshot Saturday 208

This week's level is not quite done yet, but I have an excuse! Power was out at the incubator for two days, and the internet didn't come up fully until just yesterday.

Still, the level should be done some time this weekend and is already looking pretty good.

I finalized the promotional graphics and published the game to Steam in "coming soon" mode. I'm incredibly grateful to Sam Gebhardt for contributing his Hollywood artistic talent!

Screenshot Saturday 207

Records continue to be broken. This week's map was actually done on Wednesday!

Although most of Lemma is a strange hybrid of natural and alien-looking architecture, my design calls for a few "industrial / man-made" themed maps. For story reasons, and also because I just want to parkour through a skyscraper.

So on Monday I asked Twitter this question:

Screenshot Saturday 206

I moved my office into an incubator / art gallery this week.

The move is mostly for my own sanity. Turns out, working alone in your apartment for 9 months isn't the most fun in the world. It's a Herculean effort just to stay motivated. I also lost all semblance of a disciplined sleep schedule.

Productivity has been great since the move, and I'm back on a normal sleep schedule. Having people around is great, even if I mostly tune them out to focus on work (sorry guys).