Hi, guys!
Just to let you know that the postmortem we made for our game got featured at Gamasutra!
If you haven’t played Antarctic Glitch yet, you can do it HERE.
Cheers!
Tags: antarctic glitch, beavl, postmortem
I’m pretty happy with how the game went for a few reasons.
This is actually the 3rd or 4th time I’ve participated, but only my first entry because I always seemed to give up on whatever I was making due to unforeseen problems, aiming for something beyond my ability or simply quitting from laziness. Not this time and for my efforts:
It’s a thing
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=7411
Most people that played it seemed to enjoy it and there were only a few bugs, nothing too game breaking.
Although there were many features I didn’t get to implement that I really wanted, I am still happy with it.
It would mean a lot if you’d give her a whirl!
Tags: post-mortem
Well, I’ve never done one of these before, so here goes nothing.
Long brainstorming session
I was fortunate in having a group of friends help me brainstorm ideas when the theme was first announced. About a dozen ideas were thrown around, some interesting and some worthless, until I finally settled on this one. My first few ideas were tempting but also ultimately crappy, so being able to bounce back ideas with other people saved me from falling into the usual trap of doing the first thing that fell into my head.
Playing to my strengths
This isn’t the first roguelikelike I’ve made, and for good reason, aside from loving the genre: I’m not any good at art, at all. In almost any other genre, I’d be forced to spend long hours putting together terrible art, but fortunately this wasn’t an issue for me here.
Not reinventing the wheel
For level generation and field-of-view computation, I used rot.js, an excellent set of utilities specifically designed for roguelikes. I probably could have managed without rot.js, but when you only have 48 hours, why not limit the work you have to do as much as possible? Using rot.js also offered the huge advantage of giving me something vaguely playable within an hour or two of starting, meaning that I could spend the rest of the competition working on making gameplay as fun as possible.
Addictive gameplay
My main objective with this game was making it as fun and as fast-paced as possible. To this end, I made death be completely harmless, let players immediately create a new character in one click and jump back in the game, and provided a silly soundtrack to accompany the dungeon romp. When my playtesters (er, friends) started to refuse to give me back the computer, I knew that I had stumbled onto something.
A little bit of flair
Roguelikes are inherently rather bland visually, so small touches to make the game look good were important for the player experience. Things like smooth lighting, a shiny experience bar, and a memorial to dead characters at the end of the game were all relatively quick to implement and provided a nice distraction from the big-picture stuff for me, while making the game look much more polished. Don’t skimp on the small stuff!
No good plan for the second day
Most of the game features (timer, dungeon exploration, combat, character creation) were completed in the first 24 hours, which made me very optimistic about the next 24 hours. However, while there were a lot of things that I wanted to do (including items, spells, and more interesting monsters), I spent so much time debating about what order to do them in that I wasn’t able to work most of these features into the game. In the end, my second day consisted mainly of making levels and creating the boss fight and ending, as well as doing a lot of playtesting and minor tweaking. Next time around, I’d like to budget my time a little more effectively, especially for the second day.
Not enough replay value
Well, you beat the boss, and then the game is over. Several playtesters told me the game needed to have a way to continue playing after the boss fight, but, given how messy my second day was, I declined to implement this at the time. I did eventually address this issue by adding an Infinite mode to the post-compo version though.
Dungeon annoyances
I didn’t spend enough time making sure that all dungeon stairs are reachable within 10 seconds. Sometimes the stairs aren’t, though they should still be reachable if you have a faster character (speed > 1.0). And I’m pretty sure there’s a (small) chance of the boss appearing in an unreachable location on the final level, though I haven’t personally seen that. Regardless, I should have spent more time ensuring that every game is beatable, regardless of luck of the draw.
Not enough lore
The game’s story consists of two paragraphs of flavor text that I hastily cobbled together as the minutes were counting down. I suppose it’s not that big a deal for a game that seems to have more in common with Quake than with Rogue, but it still would have been nice to have an actual story.
I’ve taken part in three Ludum Dares before, but this was by far my most successful one: I made a game that most players found to be fun, which is a feat that I have never really achieved before. Next time around, I will hopefully interpret the theme a little more creatively, and I hope to address my biggest issue from LD27: insufficient planning of secondary game features. Still, I’m pretty happy with Ten Second Roguelike. Let me know what you think!
The goodies first !
My Game : http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=27175
[EDIT] I’m stupid and just realized that is was forbidden to use someone else music in the compo entry (Ooooooops!). I won’t win (and didn’t thought I would anyway after looking at all the good games !) That’s okay, I had to read the rules. My bad ! Sorry everyone!
Hey there !
I’m Lachhh from Berzerk Studio,
I just want to give my personal super kinetic manga pirate thumbs up to Ludum Dare, it was my very first entry and I loved it !
A big thank you to Ludum Dare, I had a really fun time
I don’t have much to say actually, so this post will just be random fact and thoughts about my experience.
Fun fact : I told my wife I wanted to enter the contest the day before it started, asking her if she could take care of the kids for 2 days. She said yes, but decided totally-voluntarily-as-a-free-will-human-being to get sick the day it started, so I had to either abandon the idea or do the Game Jam on Hardcore mode : Alone, with 3 kids.
I chose the Hardcore mode.
It’s really weird to have a boy’s dream job AND and being an adult with responsibilities.
As for my game, I had a cool idea at first, but the reality struck me right in the face, I’m a coder, not an artist. I’m used to work with awesome artists at Berzerk and got spoiled over time, but yeah, since I was alone I had to go with an “Atari” “Commodore 64″ feeling for the game to be interesting.
I loved the result though, there’s only 3 level and 3 different enemies, but the feeling of the game is there. I found myself playing several time in a row just to listen to the awesome song.
Random Personal advice : My biggest weakness being the visual, I always want to shift the attention of the player on something else. The music is usually what I put on the front. In this case, each level is synchronized with the music, each 10-seconds verse represent a level in the game. My point here, try to hide your weakness by making the strongest elements of the game on the front.
Which is why I didn’t put screenshot of the game in this post. 
A screenshot alone would just show the cheap visual of the game, exposing my weakness on the front row.
How I turn my biggest weakness into a big joke.
By the way, soundtrack is by Shawn Daley, and KeithChiptunes listen to their stuff, it’s brilliant :
https://soundcloud.com/shawndaley
https://soundcloud.com/keithchiptunes
So yeah, try it out by yourself, a big thank you again to all and all the comments I got on the game, you all rock !
THE GAME : http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=27175
ENTRY-> HERE
So a few days has passed since deadline. I’m glad from all comments people have left me about my game. Got some great feedback and I thought I’d do like many others and write a short Post Mortem.
This was my first Ludum Dare and as I can’t draw or code Twine is the best engine out there for me as I can write atleast.
“The 10 (other) Seconds Journey” wasn’t my first Twine game but it’s one of the first.
INFO
The game was done in approx 5-6 hours.
Engine was Twine.
Used Google Web Fonts.
Graphics made by PaperBlurt.
The BAD
I feel I should’ve tied the 10 parts together in a better way as some people got confused, basically adding some kind of transition or similar. I also want to change the choices made during the Rock Hudson-part based on my girlfriend’s feedback. Finally maybe music would’ve been good and maybe use puns in another way. (The part with Rock Hudson is something I’ll change after the competition when I got an “OK” from Ludum Dare, but now it’ll be as it is).
The GOOD
I feel I got that quick pace and flow I sought to get. I also, somewhat like the design, as it feels just as it was: a game made in 5-6 hours. I believe I got some funny stuff in there too (Hitler, Baseballers and Titanic). I think one of the best stories is the countdown where I’ve implemented some parts from myself (you know the “dad part”) and the same go for the part regarding who you feel “second to”.
Hope you like the game, and please get back to me with thoughts and comments and feel free to check out my other stuff at the link below!
More stuff from PaperBlurt (Julius Olofsson) -> HERE
On Twitter -> @PaperBlurt
Tags: interactive fiction, LD27, ld48, Twine
Darkness loving Xenomorphs invaded and severely damaged your ship. With the ships’ generator failing every 10 seconds, you have to use timing and sacrifice to save as many crewmembers as you can. To make your escape quota of course, so the damn ship’s AI lets you leave.
That’s Love Your Pets in a nutshell. Love Your Pet aims to be survival horror puzzler slash meat grinder in a scifi setting. It preys on the constant threat of the invisible evil, and on the player being helpless in the dark.
the main mechanic in the game is the duct grates, and avoiding those grates. Scattered about the map are grates with Xenomorphs in them. Crew members passing the grate wakes the Xenomorph. During the next blackout the Xeno will attempt to devour a nearby Ensign. The lights flip on and reveal a bloody corpse and a bloody trail leading to the vents.
Simple no? Grates equal death. Death equals horror. Or so I thought.
This is what really happened.
For maximum effect the player needed to be at least tensed up enough to dread the lights going out, only to be freaked out by the sudden fresh corpse.
In reality this did not happen. Prior knowledge of the grates is critical to the player understanding and getting immersed in the game, and this mechanic was simply not obvious. I hinted to it in the narrative of course, and the blood and damage to the grates helps, but since the action happens in darkness the players eyes are never drawn towards the danger.
How can we fix this?
To remedy this in the post compo version we need to educate the player beforehand to help build tension, and draw the players focus to the ducts, and the inherent danger.
A clear threat should help build tension better and enhance the survival horror theme.
Next up: Don’t Forget Adding Content!
I was so excited this morning to see our game Mr.President featured on the front page of Giantbomb.com, my favorite website in the whole wide web.
For fun I made steam Greenlight page as well. So we would love your support to make more weird games!
Tags: dive, Mr.President, Richard Matey, save
Several days after the end of the jam, it’s time to write a short (now that I finished to write it, it’s not short) post-mortem. People who tried my game seems rather satisfied and they have enjoyed the game. I’m globally pleased with the result of my work too even if all isn’t happened perfectly. You can try my game if you want understand what I’m talking about : The Curse of Chronos.
What’s went wrong
Gameplay : I decided to spend my first two hours Saturday morning to find an idea and create a short game design document. My first idea was to create a game where you play a terrorist who trigger bombs and have ten seconds to back off before the bomb goes off. Another idea I had was a hero who has the power to see the future ten seconds in advance and can use it to change it. These ideas were ok but I wasn’t completely satisfied and I had still one hour of thinking.
I finally decided to create a rogue-like where the player has only ten seconds at the beginnning of the game. Each action like walking, talking to an npc or fighting costs time and there’s also objects which can increase hero’s amount of time.
I worked on this idea and Sunday evening, the engine was over. The hero could walk, pick-up objects, kill monsters. At this time, I noticed the gameplay of my game was rather poor. The only thing the player could do was moving as fights where automatically resolved. At the end of day 2, my rogue-like was became a simple exploration game without I notice it.
The game is not bad but I’m a bit disappointed because I’m sure I could do more interesting things with this concept. And I don’t know why but I find definitely that the gameplay of my game is poor.
Time management : I was really well at the end of day 2 concerning the deadline. I had still a lot of things to do on day 3 but I had the time to do it. And one day later, I published my entry 3 minutes before the deadline after 3 hours full of stress and tension.
I was really pleased at the end of day 2. I had a good game with good graphics and music. I think I was a bit less focus during the third day. I spend one or two hours to do other things than working on my game, thinking that the biggest part of the job was done.
At midnight (3 hours before the deadline), I begin to be a bit worry because I had still a lot of work to do. I was forced to work fast and therefore not really well. I give up to create a second music track and I hadn’t the time to balanced really well the difficulty. That’s also the moment where I begin to detect some bugs I haven’t noticed before, still increasing the amount of work to do.
I had been forced to work hard until 3am after a really long day. It was not really good especially because I could avoid it if I had keep focus during the day 3.
What’s went right.
Keep healthy habits and sleep well : In France, the Ludum Dare begin at 3am Saturday morning. For my first Ludum Dare in April, I decided it was a good idea to go out Friday evening and go back home at 7am completely drunk. I began my game only at 5pm.
I manage to avoid it this time and I take a good sleep Friday evening to be ready and fully well-rested Saturday morning at 9am.
I also take 8 hours of sleep each night. I take the time to take a shower and prepare some good dishes for my meals. It seems obvious but it’s really easy to stay focus during seven or eight hours in a row and burn out before the end. It’s truer for the jam which goes on for three days. To my mind, these moments like take a shower and eat good meals are really important to take a break and keep your body and your mind healthy.
It took more time than drink sodas, coffee and redbull during 72 hours, but I think it’s better at the end. Furthermore, it’s often after this sort of break that your succeed to fix this damn bug which annoy you since one hour.
Audio : I use two hours to produce the only track of the game. It last just one minute. I thought it’s a bit short. I was afraid that players find a bit repetitive to listen the same music during all the game, that’s why I would like to add another track. After all, it’s enough long to avoid this problem and nobody seems complain about it.
There are several sounds in the game to accentuate some actions done by the hero like pick-up an object or kill a monster. They are ok and rather effective, I think.
Graphics : I’m really pleased of my tiles and sprites and players who tried my game seems too.
Dialogs in English : Dialogs are really important in a game like this. I write the dialogs during the third day, so very fastly. It’s a bit difficult to write all these dialogs in a language which is not yours because you’re not always sure to use the correct word at the correct place. You also cannot always faithfully transpose what you would like to say. So I tried to keep the dialogs simple and used stereotypes and humor. Old men who are only obsessed by fishing, guards who are all cowards.
I’m satisfied about the result even if I could do better if I haven’t wasting time during day 3 as I said above.
Theme : I was pretty disappointed when I know what’s the theme was. I thought that the only sort of game you can do it with it was : you have ten seconds to do that, you have ten seconds to finised this level, you have ten seconds to…, and so on.
I tried 60 games until now and some of them follows this scheme. My two first game ideas was like this too (see above) but I manage to find something different and I think it’s the challenge when you have a theme : to see the theme in an original way. Among all the games I played, my favourites was those which were able to use the theme in an original way and don’t stop at the common solution which everybody will find.
Scenario and quests : I find the scenario really early when I was still thinking about game mecanics during the first two hours. Chronos, the god of the time put a curse on the hero and left him only ten seconds to live. The goal of the hero is to lift this curse. It’s quite simple but it’s enough to make a good main quest. The challenge was to use cunningly the dialogs and the settings to guide the player without he noticed it too much. The common mistake in this sort of game in open-world is to completely direct the player and he has absolutely no freedom.
Except at the beginning, where the player is a bit directed for the tutorial, I think I succeed because the player can do absolutely what he want, in the order he want but he is not release in the world without any indications. He can even go directly to «final boss» even if he will have difficulty to defeat him. Side quests are optionals but help a lot to do the main quest.
Conclusion
I’m really happy of what I did and players who played my game seems enjoyed it. I will know continue to try games of the Ludum Dare. I’m doing my best to try games of all the people who left a comment about mine.
Tags: LD27, post-mortem, tips
You can read the full post-mortem on my webpage, with additional media and commentary. I made this version more concise. (No really, I did, I swear.)
NOTE: This post-mortem contains major spoilers, so don’t read it until after you play the game.
10 Seconds in Hell is a first-person game with simple object interaction and an enforced time limit. The compo theme (“10 seconds”) pushed me to try something I’ve wanted to do for some time: create a game that is extremely short with a large number of endings. A game short enough the player doesn’t mind trying a million times to find something new.
The game takes place in one location: what appears to be a second story bedroom. The unnamed antagonist threatens to come upstairs if the player doesn’t come down in ten seconds. After some time the antagonist begins walking; when he opens the door to the room, the game ends.
There are three objects the player can pick up: A photo, a baseball bat, and a gun. They are all hidden, obscured by magazines and stacks of irregular boxes labeled “junk”. There is a phone that can be interacted with but is useless. There are four different locations that affect the ending, depending on where the player is standing when time runs out: The central area, next to the window, beside the bed, and in the closet. These are non-obvious at first, but the last three are hinted at through voiceover cues as the player walks around the environment. There are three special actions the player can take that also change the outcome: She can jump out the window, she can open the door and go downstairs as requested, or she can block the door with the aforementioned “junk” boxes. The first two options end the game immediately, and the last one buys the player extra time to explore.
Even with a starting point as simple as this, the game provides numerous endings. These non-interactive segments unfold like a radio drama: The screen fades to black and the story is told through dialog and sound effects. Unless the player jumps out the window or opens the door herself, the ending is generated based on the world state (objects collected, location) via a series of if-then statements. Mathematically speaking, 10 Seconds in Hell has 20 endings. However, some of these endings have only a single line of dialog difference between them, so one could argue that there are fewer truly unique outcomes. At any rate, the results were diverse enough to encourage players to keep digging for hidden endings, even if they found the experience truly unnerving.
And boy, did they find the experience unnerving. And I quote:
The first time I played this, I felt really scared.
This is definitely disturbing. Great job of creating a menacing atmosphere.
Very creepy. You had me on the edge of my seat.
A dark but great interpretation of the theme.
This is chilling. It’s very powerful.
All this despite very simple graphics:
The interactive objects are literally cubes with texture maps of the names of the objects. Everything else in the room is low-poly and has a simple diffuse map. I don’t even use global illumination, instead opting for fake bounce lights.
Our antagonist, the one who creates the menacing atmosphere, is a pill shape with a little tag that says “EVIL” on it. You could do this game on the PS1. And yet the game caused reactions such as this:
Trying to hide in the closet and happening across the gun [was]… intense.
A gun that’s a cuboid primitive with the word “gun” slapped on it.
Why is the game so effective at provoking emotion? The answer is simple: Abstraction. The player character is never defined. The antagonist has no face, merely an object representing his location and the word “evil” as a hint. The “porn magazines” scattered about the place have no actual content on their covers. The photo has no image on it. The antagonist is never visually depicted entering the room; you only hear him enter after the screen fades to black. The game does not explicitly tell you why you are here, what happened before this moment, or what will happen after the ending. There is a gun, but you don’t decide when it goes off. We don’t even know that the voices of these people are real.
The closest we get to an explicit clue is at the very beginning, when the player character narrates, “I replayed the scene in my mind over and over, wondering how it could have gone differently. The only thing I remember clearly was the room where it happened. Everything else was a little hazy.” Thus the abstraction: We are exploring the player character’s mind, exploring possibilities. We will never know for sure what actually went down. And perhaps those voices sound so flat and artificial because she doesn’t want to remember every disturbing detail.
This is the oldest and most effective trick in horror: Don’t show the monster. The viewer’s imagination will always concoct something more terrifying and personal than anything you can depict. The player can’t help but project her own experience onto the player character. She can’t help but put a face—a personal face, unique for her—on the antagonist. By using symbolic imagery, the terror happens in mind of the player, not on the screen. This is a game of ideas, not of lush scenery designed by an army of 3D artists for the player to admire.
So was this disturbing world of abstraction my master vision all along? No! I didn’t plan for any of it. The art style was a direct result of the time limit imposed by the competition. Were it not for the 48-hour timer ticking away, I would have modeled the world thoroughly out of sheer adherence to convention, and the game would have suffered for it. Once I put the first slapdash “object name” texture on a cube in the name of efficiency, however, I had a hunch this might actually be a good direction. After I placed the poly plane with the word “EVIL” behind the antagonist, I knew for sure this was the way to go. I had also planned to replace the computer voices with real voice acting, but I think the synth voices add to the unsettling nature of the game.
There are a few places the game didn’t work out so well: It is unclear that object use and contextual voiceovers are temporarily disabled during the introduction, while you can still move around and drag objects. There is no way to skip dialog. There is no way to know if you’ve found every ending. The game could have possibly been improved by randomizing item spawn locations. On the purely technical end, there are some rough edges due to my lack of programming skill, such as the mouse cursor remaining active when playing the web version. Subtitles would increase accessibility. Finally, given the time, I could have put more work into making each of the endings truly unique.
Tags: post-mortem
So I made the game “How Low Can You Go?” and I honestly had a lot of doable visions for it. Unfortunately I was using a new library at the time so I couldn’t get everything done. I uploaded it only because a couple of friends told me to, I did not actually feel that it was worthy :P.
I was pleasantly surprised at all the great feedback, even though the game has very minimal graphics, content, and no music or sounds. I have started work on a post-compo version which I hope to incorporate a lot of the feedback and my original ideas in.
Anyway…
What went well:
-Relatively easy theme and idea
-I’ve gotten good enough at coding that nothing was difficult for me
-I had a lot of fun hanging out at Ryerson’s Game Maker Union
What didn’t:
-New library with new complications
-Not enough time left for graphics and sound
Anyway, really fun, and hope to do it again 😀
Game: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=20256
I think it’s now properly multiplatform, so it should work on Linux, Windows 8 and all that. I think.
Anyways, the page is here.
Cheers.
Hey, still didn’t try Flooded Dungeons?
It’s stressful dungeon crawler, where you should reach the next floor in 10 seconds. Okay, a bit more than 10 seconds.
Run through dungeons, collect gold, smash crates and monsters, buy items in shop, improve equipment, gain expirience and get level ups, heal yourself using potions, explode walls and enemies using boms, grill deeper as you can! But beware the water flow!
My own record is the 54th floor:
I have added fixed Windows version and Mac port.
Changes (in the Windows Fixed and Mac versions both):
Please test Mac version of the game. I don’t have native machine with MacOSX and worked under VMWare.
I’m interesting about FPS on native MacOSX. If it’s about 57-60, all is OK. Otherwise please write your FPS in comments.
This was my first ludum dare and i will definitely be in again! I had so much fun and learned loads.
I always have a few projects running but I never manage to finish any of them because I have too grand plans. The great thing about ludum dare were that i needed finish in 48 hours, I couldn’t think “Well, this took 9 hours, didn’t do shit, but I will thank myself later!”. I had to learn to “kill my darlings” and to do it fast! I am kinda surprised that actually finished! The game I made is far from good but I couldn’t be prouder!
Some things I will try to remember til’ next time:
1. Start with a small idea. I mean really really small. I thought I did that this time but cut half of my planned features anyway. It’s less of a pain to go from smaller to bigger then the opposite…
2. Make a really crappy but functional game first. What is needed to make the game even playable? Add that first.
3. Try the game on more than one computer. I had loads of problems with people that couldn’t play it or had really weird behavior.
4. Don’t drink yourself to sleep half into the competition. I went on a party and had to make most of the game while trying to keep my stomach on the inside..
Thanks for a great ludum dare!
Play my game, Rocket Rampage
I have built a post-compo version of Frozen Braid! This game version does not change the gameplay itself, but it adds the option to play by e-mail or over a chat program with file transfer or with carrier pigeons and thumb drives.
Here is how it works:
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=7968
Web port of is Dark Interval is live!
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=5234
Also the standalone Windows and Linux builds have the memory leak fixed.
So I decided to spend some time adding and polishing my entry, Lokopolis. I added a few things, including online scoring (via GameJolt), more traps and a harder mode! Hopefully it’s been worth it, as I find the game really fun, which is unlikely for a Ludum Dare made game.
You can download the new release over on GameJolt, as well as the LD version too!
I also uploaded the music that I created for the game if you would like to have a listen. You can find that on the GameJolt page too.
I’ve finally recovered from the weekend an feel its time to write a “post mortem” for my game 10 Second Physics.
So first off I want to say that I had so much fun and learned so much during the weekend all thanks to you guys in the Ludum Dare community ,thanks to everyone who has rated ,commented and played my game. You all made my first Ludum dare a memorable experience.
So lets crack this body open and find out how it died!!!
-The Good-
This was one of my main goals when entering the competition. I wanted to implement my own player controlled movement script as I find the default one for the unity engine to be a bit too awkward. Now I know the controls aren’t the greatest, but I’m proud of what I achieved here .
My favorite part of making games is designing levels. Ever since as a kid when I would design levels for “Tony Hawkes Pro Skater” I have loved the prospect of designing clever levels. One thing I like about level design is that you have the power to control the players emotions or thought patterns from how a single line can create a feeling of urgency to how a complicated puzzle may confuse you and make you spend more time on a level. I had a good time coming up with puzzles which to me seem simple but to someone who has to process it all in one go it may convert what is ten seconds for me into a whole minute to work out what to do. When I decided to make it puzzle based and not action based I looked at a few articles online about puzzle design, this was probably one of my best decisions I made about this game.
-The Bad-
During the Jam I often found myself not sure what to work on next or how long something would take. This was noticeable on day 1 when I didn’t give up trying to implement character animation after three hours working on it and when with three hours left I dedicated two hours to music that was never used.
I had intended to make some pretty GUI but ended up with an awkward menu screen and a default font timer which was probably not needed after all.
-The Future of 10 Second Physics-
I had so much fun making the game and so many other ideas for features ,levels ,puzzles and even a bit of a story shown through comic strips that I have decided to keep developing this for a few updates. I want to implement some GUI and better controls too. The snazzy logo at the top of this post is going to be in the title screen from now on and I plan to design more menus.
Thank you for this unforgettable experience everyone.
Play my Ludum Dare 27 entry Bomb Squad
This is my second time participating in the official Ludum Dare competition. Overall, I feel like my skills with Unity have significantly increased since the last competition, when I submitted Amish Brothers. Since the last competition, I have submitted a game to each mini-LD, and each game developed taught me something new about Unity.
Bomb Squad Timelapse video
This time around, the theme was “10 seconds”. My idea was a game where you play as a bomb squad technician, where you have 10 seconds to disable each bomb. If the bomb explodes, the objects around it will be propelled away and add to the property damage value. The objective is to keep the property damage as low as possible, while avoiding bomb blasts which damage your suit. If your suit reaches zero percent, then the game is over. Additionally, you must “cut the wire” that matches the color of the bomb, otherwise the bomb will explode and you will take damage. For more details on my design decisions, see my Bomb Squad Day One entry.
Bomb exploding next to a wall
For this game, I knew I wanted to use Unity’s physics engine for handling the explosions. I first started learning about Unity’s physics engine when I developed Earthball for the mini-LD42. When the bomb explodes, it applies an explosive force to all of the objects in the game, including the player. I found that this starting causing problems when there were over about 600 objects in the scene. When the objects were exploded and scattered everywhere, the slowdown didn’t occur. It was only when the objects were stacked, which I believe is because when the objects are stacked, they are continually colliding with each other, which requires a significant amount of processing power. The player is also affected by bomb blasts, but I feel that if I learned how to use the “ragdoll” physics in Unity, the effect would have been much more impressive. Currently, the player just has a cube bounding box, so the player looks very stiff when thrown by an explosion.
The ground is just a terrain object (like I used in the test Giga Guy game that I developed), but I always have issues with my models falling over when going up the terrain, therefore I just left the game area flat. However, I was able to use the blended terrain textures to make the ground look much more pleasing.
I used Blender again for rendering my models. There were really only two models that are in this game, which are the player and the bombs. From my LD27-warmup game North Avenue Adventure, I learned how to properly project my mesh to a 2D layout, and how to modify the unwrapped vertex “islands” properly to generate an image layout to be textured in Gimp. I am happy with the model that I created, but I would like to go back and add more details later. However, I found that it can be difficult to modify a model in Blender once all the modifiers (mirror, subdivision surface) have been applied and the armature added. I also think I could have done a much better job on the bomb model, since it is just a stack of cylinders. A spark particle system on the bomb would also be a nice touch.
My mini-LD43 game, Marching Band Simulator 2013 taught me more about composing music in games. However, for Bomb Squad I decided to go with Garage Band on my Mac laptop for composing the music. In my previous entries, I have used PxTone Collage which is a great tool, but the blips and bloops it uses cannot compare to the music that can be created with Garage Band. For the complete soundtrack, please visit my Sound Cloud page. The only problem with Garage Band is that I had to export my songs to iTunes to get the audio file, and then copy it over to my development system. It is a bit of a hassle, but I think it is worth the extra effort.
Another game I created in Unity for #1GAM was called Genetic Disorder, which is where I learned how to make the text meshes for the title screen using Blender. It’s a fairly simplistic process, but the number of vertices must be reduced otherwise the model file size will end up being huge.
Text mesh zooming in on title screen
For the 7dRTS challenge, I created a game called Ninja Squad Commander, where I learned many more Unity tricks. First of all, it taught me how to center a text object over a model, and how to make the 3D text sharp (by default the 3D text will be blurry). This was used in Bomb Squad to display the number of seconds until explosion over each bomb. In that game, I also learned how to make detailed particle systems, like the fire effects, using Gimp to create the fire texture using a gradient and IWarp filters. The game also taught me how to attach lights to particle systems at runtime, to give the fire a glowing effect which can be seen on objects around it. Both of these effects were used in Bomb Squad at the location of an exploded bomb. When I was developing the RTS, I also learned how to determine the distance between two objects in 3D space, since using multiple physics colliders for different events can cause problems. The 3D distance calculation was essential to determine how much damage the player would take from a blast, and how much property damage is received by an object. The distance calculation is also used to determine if a bomb is selected to be disabled. My 7dRTS game also taught me how to make a shadowed font from a text object, which made the static text in the game look much better.
The one new feature that I added that I hadn’t implemented in a previous game is the mini-map. I felt that it was needed, since the player can’t always see the entire game area, so there would be bombs hidden to the player. That problem could be helped by adding code to fix the camera behind the player, so that is something I will look into for a future release. I think the mini-map would still be beneficial, but some players noted that it makes the game a little too easy, so I may eventually take away the bomb color on the mini-map.
Honestly, I can say Bomb Squad wouldn’t have turned out as good as it did if I hadn’t created all of those other smaller games after LD26. One important factor in being successful in Ludum Dare is knowing your tools and all the tricks before the competition starts. Trying to learn new technologies during the competition is a recipe for failure.
Follow me on Twitter at @GaTechGrad and visit my website at www.levidsmith.com
Tags: post-mortem, postmortem, timelapse
Hi!
Here is the entry we talking about: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=5167
The concept came from the fact I once wanted to do a platform game for LD 21 but then I chose NDS as the platform which I wasn’t familiar at all at the time so it didn’t made it in time. But a plain platformer seemd too plain so I wanted a mechanic that can enhance the idea and goes well with the theme. That turned out to be a Tetris + Bejeweled freak and it was quite fitting to the theme and the platformer part.
I’ve made a little video of the game for you but I encourage you to play it as it runs on most platforms and even in a browser.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M5J6SPu2tgs
You can tell from the video that the game isn’t quite finished. Let’s see in short what led me to this faliure.
What went wrong
Normally the structure came naturally to me while programming and everithing fits just fine and builds on each other. This time I had to rewrite parts of the mechanics several times to support other functionalities better. That taken away a lot of time and momentum. I don’t know what happend to me… 
I recently changed my daily routine – or should I say I’ve tried to create one – and it’s not the real problem but it did take away more time from programming as opposed to the 48h is 48h tactic I used to do.
A little depression came from my real life and from the fact that I’m not doing as well as I used to. This ultimately lead to give up on the finishing of the collision checking as it would required to rewrite the whole falling block mechanic.
Advise
Get yourself together and push through no matter what!
Thank you for reading! Please give my game a try and leave a comment! I’ll rate back of course.
Tags: post-mortem, video
I’ll probably be putting up a post compo version at some point…when I go to the edit page there isn’t a place to put the link. How do I do this? Can anybody help?
Ian