It’s my third time now, can’t wait for another LD.
In LD25, I started with Rude Bear, a quirky little game with some lacking game mechanics. My housemate drew the drawings by hand, and scanned them in, and I made them into these little.. puppet things.
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-25/?action=preview&uid=19499
I was pretty happy getting 9th in humour and 72nd overall! It really needed some proper hit detection though, I didn’t get time to add it, and it lacked some big features I wanted. A nice start though.
Then in LD26, my housemate and I decided that in every LD, the main character of the game should always be Rude Bear (but that’s where the similarity would end between every game; each one would be a different genre etc, which we figure out as soon as the theme gets announced), and we’ll make up a convoluted timeline as we go along, Zelda style. The second game was Rude Bear Rising, the prequel to Rude Bear in one timeline.
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=19499
A big problem with this was that.. I was using an extremely convoluted method to do 2d collisions in Unity3D. I essentially wrote my own 2d physics engine from scratch that casted rays everywhere and took the UVs of textures to do the physics, so we could load in textures of any shape and they would (theoretically) collide just right. Hit detection was a bit lacking though. It got a bit convoluted with the bubble bar, and short range combat was too pernickety.
I was really happy with the soundtrack and sfx though, and the idea itself was pretty cool. It started as a little exploring game, became a Mega Man esque game where you fight through 5 boss battles in any order you choose, rotating the world 90 degrees to get to them, and unlocking different abilities to use. It suffered from its bugs though, it was perhaps too ambitious to make such a large game, soundtrack and engine from scratch. I put in a solid 60 hours. I also tried to make it minimal with the untextured backgrounds, vector art, ambient soundtrack and pixel art, but playing other people’s entries, I soon realised that most people were just using geometry.
So, so far in the Rude Bear series, we’ve seen that initially, he was an underwater hero named Polite Bear. Upon being defeated by The Wizard (by losing in Rude Bear: Rising), he got transmorphed into Rude Bear, and came up to the surface of the water to wreak havoc in a park. This is “The Hero is Defeated” timeline. How the timeline continues entirely depends on the themes of the LDs. e.g. if “Future” won, I’d probably go for Rude Bear: Revengeance. If rotation won, Rude Bear: Revolution. One day if an RPG is suitable, I’d like to do Rude Bear Red and Rude Bear Blue.
If the theme doesn’t really lend itself to adding to the timeline though, I’ll just do “spin-offs”. e.g. if 10 seconds wins, I could go for a Majora’s Masky type thing, which could fit the timeline well, or I could go for a Wario Ware type experience, call it Rudio Bare etc.
Really, though, all I want to do is consistently make every game better and better. In a year or two, I want my LD entries to be so consistently good that people are like, “Oh hey, let’s check the new Rude Bear game”.
But, anyway, I’ve ranted far too much! The weapons at my disposal:
- Unity3D, programmed in C#.
- FL Studio, Cubase, Omnisphere, Massive, and mda.
- Inkscape for vector art. My housemate normally does the majority of the graphics, but he may be unable to help me this time, in which case I may have to try my hand at 3D, or geometry style stuff, ’cause I won’t have the time to animate pixel art.
- I gave up diet coke a month or two ago, but I’m totally picking it up again if I want to blast out another 60 hours like last time.
Happy jamming, and I really hope I make something that wows you all.
