Darn midi music keyboard was messing up, so it’s taken me a good while to finally get everything started…

Here’s what I have so far, the lighting took the longest I’d say, but in my opinion it looks pleasing.

And here’s some music I did in about 15 minutes!
https://soundcloud.com/thestolenbattenberg/when-hope-is-here-wip

Finished up a couple of infrastructural things, then made some levels. Coming along nicely! The collisions still feel a little buggy though, and I still need to integrate the theme.

First run

UPDATE FROM THE TINKERMILL:

SUCCESS!  We have our first level artwork finished.  It’s a quick first step, but an important one.  We came to the realization that we don’t want to put in our voices into the game (it doesn’t sound quite right).  It’s a small update, but we have a bunch of assets ready to put into the game.   More to follow as the game develops.

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 11th, 2014 at 6:45 pm and is filed under MiniLD #48. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Had no idea this was happening this weekend, but Linear and I are going to be joining in with a game that we’ll be working on, “Red Chimera”! Looking forward to this!

I don’t really know what this game has to do with the themes anymore, but I’m going to finish it anyway.

I am making a sliding puzzle game. You have to manipulate gravity to get to the door of your house. (Because you are too lazy to walk.)

After a couple of times watching. I decided to join.

My tools are:

• Unity
• Photoshop
• Blender
• (maybe) Substance Designer
• (maybe) Audacity
• sometimes my brain 😉

Hope you all have fun like I do.

Im in a day late, probably not going to complete a game. Might as well try!!

I am using:

Eclipse IDE

paint.NET

sfxr

Game: Revenge in Company

Conclusions from results and comments:

1.  Game should be short and puzzling, short and simple, or long and puzzling. I made long game with one puzzle: to find actual target from persons in the office. It’s simply boring.
2.  “Cute” 3D graphic is not rated much when it’s too simple. I was really proud of my graphic(especially because  I’m a programmer;-) ), and get encourage from user comments who find this graphic cute and neat. For me it’s very simple but still nice for eyes. I ended up on #395 place. Comparing rates between 2D and 3D games,  I’m convince that low quality 2D graphic is still rated better then medium quality 3D graphic. If you make game in 3D, your graphic should be perfect.
3. Community rate severely. When I saw my results for the first time I was disappointed. Then I checked games that I rated. Their final results are much below rates that I gave them. That changes the way of looking on results for me.
4. The first objective should be very easy. I put the first target just near the start position, so user could see it without even moving! For me it was easy enough. The point is, many users on the beginning of the game just run out of the room to check controls or whatever! Then, they really have problem with finding even first target, so they gave up. That didn’t give them fun.
5. Make linear progression of difficult. One of the comment: “Hard to find people, or I was just not good at it. Could have used a little linear progression at the start before opening up the whole office.” Players are not in a mood for slowly discover a game. I was thinking about making some kind of navigator that would make easier to find target in the company. Then I dropped it. I assumed the player will have fun searching them in the whole company. True is, that this is Ludum Dare. When player start the game, he want to see progress ASAP.
6. Controls have to be perfect. My have a bug, that when you hold UP button and then press RIGHT, you will still go up until you release UP button. When I played it I just hold one button at the time and it was good enough for me. It wasn’t good enough for others. Bad controls are the first thing to kill fun of the game.
7. Spent more time on audio. Making audio was fun, and relaxing for my brain. It was mistake that I made it as the last thing.

See you next LD!

So we made it to the 2nd place for graphics and to the 50th place overall for our LD28 jam entry : XenoSerf!
We’re somewhat happy with the results, considering how chaotic this LD was.

We started to work on a post-jam version of the game today : what we want to do is fix the controls, because they currently spoil the experience for the player, and add a bit of visual feedback for the player’s actions.
We will also include new visuals, and some sounds we couldn’t implement during the time limit.

You can play the jam version of Xenoserf here and we certainly will make a post when the polished version is done!

Okay people, my game for MiniLD is getting slowly but surely there.

I am really tired now and need to go to bed.

Thought I’ll share some screenshots, please bare with me:

I know that everytime someone came to question this, but somethings have been bothering me for a long time:

The first thing is, there is no rule about the content in Jam event, so, I could use every asset I can find as long I have the rights to use it?

I mean…really?

So I could mod a game (I mean, use it’s assets to make another one), use personal libraries, use art that I made for other games and etc?

Just to be sure, it is really allowed?

I’m not criticizing, just asking if it really is like this.

About the Comp part, “4. All publicly available libraries and middleware are allowed”, so if I say before the start of the jam “hey guys, I’m gonna to use this package that has all the code that I need, you can download here if you want” it is allowed?

Again, I’m not criticizing, just asking.

PS.: I read the “For Jam games, you are free to use whatever artwork or content you like (preferably something you have the legal rights to), but you must accept all responsibility for its use”, just want to be sure.

Tags: rules

Quitting MiniLD. Out of ideas. See you next month perhaps.

[CLICK HERE TO SEE THE ORIGINAL POST]

So it’s almost been a week since the results for LD28 were out and even I though I did worse than last time, I thought I might do a quick breakdown of my results for my game One Jump and see where I went wrong:

Ratings

Strongest Category – Theme: The one that almost made it to top 100. Didn’t really enjoy the theme for this Ludum Dare but I’m glad people thought my game fitted it somewhat well.

Weakest Category – Graphics: I’m very bad at drawing things but I’m going to try and make an improvement for the next Dare.

Even though I’ve done two entries so far, here’s a little chart comparing how I did last time:

Overall, despite this entry being the first to be submitted for the compo (The last one was for the jam), there’s probably a lot of stuff I really need to improve on such as graphics. I will still keep aiming to submit my entries in the time for the compo but will consider submitting for the jam if it needs that extra polish.

Finally, thank you to everyone who rated my game and gave nice comments about it as well as useful constructive criticism.

See you in April for Ludum Dare 29!!

Tags: results

We did #95 overall on the last LD Jam with Rogue Rush (thanks, thanks, thanks), so I feel compelled to write a bit of code for the mini LD…

Murika fuck yeah!

I haven’t done much in the way of level design since my last post, but I did take the time (Way too much time) sprucing the graphics up a bit. I currently have nine levels, but I want to ship the game with twenty.

Here’s a screen of the new, ever-so-slightly different graphics;

Hi !

I’ve done a lot of things for now. It only remains for me to do 4-5 things \o .

I have had such difficulty with getting an engine working for the miniLD. However, after 24 hours of the competition (for me, at least, since I live on the west coast of the US) my game is starting to shape up! Now it’s time to start making enemies and levels… Good luck to everyone else who this is their first LD event also!

Yesterday there was little to show.

Today, the basic mechanics feel quite complete so I’ve had a great time experimenting and adding effects.

All fonts and several assets are still just placeholders, but that shouldn’t be too demanding to fix tomorrow.

I’ve done a main menu and a tutorial level. As a happy accident, the bricks I was painting the menu terrain with happened to swim all by themselves. They are obviously up to no good, but I think it worked great.

And though the surroundings to the brick wall is still to be replaced, I’m very happy with that brick shattering and the tweening when new bricks are shoved into their right place:

The skip button for the tutorial is in place (upper left). Don’t forget skip buttons if you have intros or tutorials!

It will appear on the levels too after the player has attempted some few trimes.

The main obstacle is I won’t have time to work for half of tomorrow and to make a decent first level at least, I would need to make 3D assets (windows, doors, and whatnot).
We’ll see how it goes. Worst case scenario, I can put the bricks in new patterns and have the levels work by adjusting the amount of usurpers and rate of conspiracy.

Almost keeping the schedule I’ve set for myself so far. For tomorrow there are still many thing but those with low priority could probably be regarded as a wishlist.

I, must say, I’m having very much fun. Fourth game development in Unity and the rocks I hit are definitely more spaced out and softer.

Tags: gif, juice