What?!!!

A new version of Switcher?

It has music?!!!

After some days of work a new version of Switcher is ready 😀

You can play it here

I hope you enjoy the improvements!

Here’s my short post-mortem for The Legend of the Thunder Fish.  Cross-posted from brianmacintosh.com.

I worked with Justin Britch on this one. We met just after the theme was announced to brainstorm. I really liked this theme – it evokes mystery and exploration, provides an easy setting (underground or underwater) to start with, and could simultaneously be tied into gameplay elements. While we thought it would have been a lot of fun to make “Ben Eath, the Surf Ace”, we ultimately decided that we really wanted to go after the mystery, the thrill of exploration, fear of the unknown, and such themes. We also knew that we wanted to attempt to introduce some sort of narrative into the world.

The beginnings of the conversation system.

The design was ambitiously scoped for a jam, and I’m happy I was able to turn out so many features.

More conversation.

The Good: Dedicating time during the development process for polish worked well for the game. When polish gets left as a task for the end of the jam, there’s often no time to actually do it. I didn’t leave a feature until it was in a state it could stay in.

I also didn’t run into too many momentum-killer problems.  I’ve worked on several smaller projects using HTML5 and ThreeJS over the past few months, so I knew some of its quirks and was able to work continuously without getting stuck on strange bugs, even though the codebase for Thunder Fish pushed way past the size of my previous HTML games.  Familiarity is key for jams, and it definitely pays off in the ability to continue grinding out features.

Learned: Yet again, I completely failed to allocate time for audio. Fortunately, I was already in the Jam category for this one, so I pulled some free music fromNGXmusical in the last hour. Sound effects could have improved the feel even further, though.

Interested?  Play and rate here!  http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=15030

I thought I’d make a little guide to my submission, From under the snow

I’m very proud of it – it’s the second game I get to make in the Furnace Engine. I obviously recommend it 😉

Hello guys Gluckauf Troll, our entry in LD29 was in a technology exhibition, in Tenerife (Canary Islands). The name os this exhibition its “FI2”.

We have a lot of  photos from this event. If you want to see all, you can do it in our facebook page. We have a good news about this game, A COMPANY WANT TO BUY THIS GAME!!! :D. We are so much happy just right now.  I add more photos here from this event.

I tried to review some games as I said but my video (1 hour long) got destroyed by a bug!

Sorry! I’ll make shorter videos from now on in order to avoid such bad destructions caused by bugs. (The video is called ‘Review of various Ludum Dare games’ (by Caridorcc Tergilti)), if you want you can check it out and you can hear the audio)

If you want consideration for the video and your game isn’t on the list of games I’ve currently played (and you think your game has at least a small shot at being in the top 25 or so in any category) then let me know your game’s name and I’ll try to get to it before the video is done. Note that I really do try to play every game to completion. Here is the list of games I’ve played so far: (Should be Alphabetical)

24100
30 Days Remain
a story
A Trip Underground
Above and Below
Above the Core
Abyssal Trek
Airport Security Screener
Alien Lobotomy
An Osterreich tale, or something about ostriches
Anett
aoutch!
Apologeticum
Arctic Desert
ASCII: Beneath the Surface
Atlantis Explorer
Atoms – Literally beneath the surface
Aviation Disaster Recovery Simulator
Bacteraemia
Balancitos
Ball Club
Barry the Avalanche Dog
Basement
Baum
Beat To The Bottom (BTTB)
beneath
Beneath Europa
Beneath Me
Beneath the Duck Face
Beneath The Lab
Beneath the Surf Ace
Beneath The Surface
Beneath The Surface
Beneath The Surface
Beneath The Surface
Beneath The Surface In The Sky
Beneath the Surface… Adventure
Beneath the Trolls
Beneath the… hey, look, shiny things!
Berserker
Billy Bigdigger
Bloody Barry
Bloop
Blundergaffe
Bobs Incident
Bombcano
Botch Bundle
Bouboule is Rolling
Bridge to the Abyss
Bubble Cannon
Cave Money
CavEscape
Cavesploration
Chacket Valleyparker: DRILL BUNNY
Charly’s Psyche
Chassis Driller
Clarity
Clobsters
Come Home
COVERUP
CTS
Cybs Submarine
Dagfin
Damn Sharks
Damned Scouts
Dark Soils
Dead men tell no tales
Death’s Masquerade
Deep Sea Diving
DEPTH BENEATH
DepthCharge
DIG! DIG! DIG!
Dive
Dive! Dive! Dive!
Dolphin and Lava
Doors & Secrets
Down
Dr. Beat
Drill
Drill18: The Mars Project
Drop Up
Dungeon Encounter
Dungeons Of Yeragr
Dwarf
Effin’ Rats
Escape From Guardian (Fixed link!)
Exile
Explore Beneath the Surface
ExploZone: Beneath the Surface
Fake Zoo
FedIt!
Feelin N Dealin
Find the Booty
Firefish
First Person Platformer
Fish Photographer Simulator
Forerunner
Forsaken Pit
Fortune and Glory
Fridge Magnetism
From Below
From the Under
Frustration
GLUCKAUF TROLL
God Hunter
Gold Digger
Gold Diver
Gravitas
Growdrop
Gun Bat
Hammerfall
HammerHead in the Sea of Monsters
Happy Fishing
Hare’s Harvest
Hollow Earth
Holy Moly
Hopelessness
House of Clouds
Hungry Dolphin
Hyper Seed
Icesome!
In The Caves
Infinite Hell Loop
Installation ZA-3
It Came From The Sewer
Journey to the Center of the Hole
Kappa cat
Keep the Gem!
Kill or Kill
Klondike Nuggets
Kraken
Let’s Save the World (again)
lightness of being
Lim
Lost Sheep
Lost Villages
Louis and the Louse
Lumbricidae
Memory Eater
Mind the Gap
Mind Your Business
Mine The Planet
Mining Under The Surface
MOOD
Mr Tibbles Lost in the City of R’lyeh
Mra
My Little Submarine
Nadir
Nauticalamity
Necronomicon
No Eyes Willy
Octopus Simulator
Off the Hook!
Olm
OVER/FISH
Pawn
PET RUN/STOP
Pixel Draw
Planet Improver
PlanetoLution
Plop Away
Poopy Kitty Defense
PR0BE
Princess Fart
punk n roll
QP : Fix the leak!
Raged Milling
Rats Under My Skin
Reflection
Relica
Revenge of the Fish
Revenge of the Kraken
Room Cleaning Simulator 2014
Safe House
Save Us
Saving Grace
Scratch
Seafloor Defense
Searching Beneath the Surface
Seismic Charge
Sewer Rat Escape
Shark, Shark, Shark!
Shifter
Side B, Track 1
Sinful Horse
sirtet
Small sacrifice
Snack on the fly
Soil Manufacturing
Somewhere… Beneath the surface…
SOS
Soulitude
Space flappy shrimp bubble ninja blob 2048 X-Alpha Turbo Edition
Speed Driller
Starpit
Sub Bomber
Sub Memory
Submarine
Submarine Playground
Submersed Joe
Submersion
Subocula
Subsea War
Subterranean Extermination
Superficial
Surface Tension
SurfaZ
Teddy & His Cat
the Attack – Beneath the Surface
The bunker game
The Collector
The Creature of the Depths Must Feed his Sheep
The DARING ADVENTURES of the BLOB that can hide BENEATH THE SURFACE
The Drowning Man
The Gathering
The Golden Bean
The Hole
The Leeway Brothers’ Bohemian Debut Of A Lifetime
The Longest Way Down
The Money Beneath Our Ground
The Moustache Rebellion
The Sea Has No Claim
The Spikes Beneath
Theres’s a Twist
They Come With Fire
Things for free
Thurgood P. Marshall and the Quest for Ontological Theory Advancement
Tingling Under Attack
TIT for TAT
To Hell
Totems
Trapped Under Ice
Tube
Tunnel Digger: Artifact Man
Under
Under Arctic
Under Heroes
Under the bed
Under the kitchen surface
Under Your Skin
Underground City Defender
Underground Racing 2
Undermine: A lesson in Middle Management
Underneath Your Skin
Underwater Words
Villager
Water Beneath Mars
What Happened?
Where am I ?
Winter Is Coming . . .
Wunderheilung
XUNDER
Zits!

Ghost Story updates:

– Updated version with new input control.
– New Windows version with customizable input control.

Thank you all for playing and commenting this game, I hope you like the game ^-^
Here is the LINK.

The Theme and Initial Ideas

The theme for LD29 was ‘Beneath the surface’, initially the theme didn’t fire up my imagination. It had obvious connotations of mining and deep sea. Once I did a bit of brainstorming I started to come up with ideas around emotions, controlling complex mechanisms with simplex mechanics and political systems.

This brainstorming around these areas led to about 16 ideas, which I then whittled down to 4 ideas which included the following

Building Shelters

You have to protect creatures that live below the surface of the world, these creatures are very vulnerable to the elements and you have to build structures to protect them while they navigate to their new homes.

Creating Patterns on a Surface

This idea and the basis in how old Cathode Ray TVs illuminated pixels on the screen. In this idea you would be using electro-magnets to guide a beam to a given pixel and then illuminate said pixel for points.

Herman’s Head

Do you remember the really crappy US TV ‘comedy’ Herman’s Head? If not, lucky you! This trailer and wiki page are enough to give you an idea what the show was like.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herman’s_Head
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H8tzXFagaso

The idea is that control different aspects of a persons personality to complete tasks, the important thing was to keep everything balanced.

Political Corruption Games

In this game you would be control the hidden forces which lurk beneath the surface of a supposed Democracy.

I basically decided to go with the Creating Patterns on the Surface idea as I believed that I could limit the scale of the project, I also liked the idea of playing around with simple mechanics and finally I really liked the idea that you where not in direct control.

Constraints

Obviously because this project was part of Ludum Dare the biggest constraint of all was the time limit of 48 hours, I also added an additional time based constraint to myself by deciding to have a normal sleeping pattern. Usually in a Jam situation I would stay up for as much of the 48 hours as possible but I couldn’t do this for Ludum Dare as I had a bunch of work to do on the Monday after the Jam.

The next constraint was my skill base, I think of myself as a Games Programmer. My art skills are pretty much non-existent  and I believe that I don’t flex my design muscles enough to really have a very polished game system. With this constraint in mind, I decided to keep the art style very simple(basic shapes and colours) and keep the main mechanics very simple but with enough design space to enable some interesting mechanics to come out.

Part 2 – can be read here and my entry can played here. Please play, rate and give feedback. Cheers!!!

I am not a big fan of wordpress, so I was using my Tumblr to post very intermittent dev diaries of my LD29 entry, these can be read at the following link

http://bigbearscot.tumblr.com/tagged/ld48

I have to fly somewhere tomorrow, but I wanted to make sure I got at least a partial Post-Compo version up of The Creature Below before I left! There are still a lot of cosmetic changes I want to make, but I got around to some of them, and fixed plenty of bugs as well.

Bask in the fact that you now face the correct direction on KEYUP events, that you can see what new item you received, and that your health actually refills to full when you die! Plus, a much-requested change: The Creature takes longer to kill you.

Still didn’t quite get around to that death animation. It will happen! I promise!

Hey everyone!

I’m very happy to announce that I finally managed to release an album with soundtracks from my LD games.

The album includes three totally happy tunes from totally awesome gamejams:

• Polytonia – LD 28
• Pond Tycoon – LD 29
• Fiddle Daily – BossJam 2014

And as always, I’m really curious to hear your opinions! So feel free to drop a comment to share your thoughts

Thanks for great jamming!

Spotify

iTunes

DRM-free: contact robinerd(at)gmail.com

Check out my Blog HERE

I just received a really awesome review from Jupiter from shoddypixels.com

Carnival Warfare is a game about selling enough stuff at the carnival. This one of the only games that I played several times. The player controls a man at the animal station. He must sell a quota of animals or face losing his job. In order to do this, he must advertise, but not too much as to annoy customers, and keep his station stocked. The more animals that are sold, the better respect the player has. You can trade in respect for upgrades, like a bigger booth that can hold more stock. I really liked the simple but well done graphics to this game. The objects that the children buy at the carnival are then carried around on the peoples heads, which I found to be funny. I was able to last three days in this business, but found it hard to keep my respect when I had to restock. The restock tent is far away from the animal tent and requires the player to walk all the way to it and then back to their own tent to continue playing. This game is challenging and really addicting. http://shoddypixels.com/2014/05/12/ludum-dare-29/

You can play Carnival Warfare here:

My game, The Last Beacon now has a post-Compo version! Still WIP because I want to extend the game itself, but it has some major updates: – fixed bug that didn’t update laser beam when it destroyed a block 
– fixed bug that allowed player shooting a buggy laser beam while falling 
– reduced breakable block durability 
– grappling hook now doesn’t work on lvl1 
– improved (but still WIP) main menu

Get it here. You can find the submission page here.

A lot of people liked the music of your game, so we will share a track!

The music was created by Adalberto Rodrigues!

Tags: music

I finally took the time to make a tutorial / walkthrough of Planet Improver:

You can check out the game here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=6821

Alright, I’m working on the Post Compo version of StrataGEM.

I’m adding simple animations to the tile movement. This should help the player understand what is going on when they make an action. The plan is to “pop out” tiles before moving them. They have to rise above the other tiles or else they will Z-fight through their neighbors as they move. I also need to transform the tile as I move it because the base hexagons are slightly differently shaped. WIP pop out:

I just finished Part 8: Importing into Unity! This concludes the tutorial, which takes you through the entire modeling, UV mapping, texturing, rigging, and animating process from scratch! You can find the first post in the series here. Thanks to everyone who left feedback, both constructive and positive!

I created Sail using this process, so if you like my style of low-poly graphics and are wondering how on earth I made the models, UV’d, textured, rigged, and animated them all in 48 hours, you might be interested in this series!

Also, I’m totally open to feedback on these articles! Please let me know if any parts are confusing, or overdrawn, or straight-up wrong! You can leave a comment here, or on my site (no email or registration is required–  you can leave any or all the fields blank in the comment form), or let me know on Twitter!

I just released Tiny Thor for iOS. The game I started at Ludum Dare 28.

GET IT HERE 😉

It’s a couple of weeks after the contest, a few days before the results will be released. It feels about right to add a how-did-I-do-it? post.

Like last time I kept an extensive log on the subject and my progress. I used these tools:

• GameCreator (Online game editor)
• Gimp
• Blender

Using my 3d mouse the 3d explorer and a wacom cintiq drawing board as main hardware input.

I started off with the writing down the concept on paper (or word for that matter). The game ended up as a point and click adventure through an underwater base which is near total destruction. I thought up an emotional story about a young girl, trapped beneath the surface of the ocean. As she’s the only person, deep underneath the surface, she feels trapped and alone as she tries to flee her confinement.

Writing down the concept on (digital) paper

After finishing those I went on to create every scene in a story board. I drew my storyboard directly inside the GameCreators editor as it allowed me  to quickly prototype it.

Sketching and prototyping

After I decided the prototype was correct I continued to improve the logic and update the graphics.

The three stages I used to improve the scenery.

What went wrong?

Nothing really went bad, but I did end up with an issue related to the audio. I couldn’t match the mood with the audio, so I had to leave it out. Other thing is I probably used too much time on the scenery. I first thought to draw it all out in 2d. But after I finished all the mockup scenes I decided 3d modelling would allow me to easier set the mood I wanted.

What went right?

After I decided to go full 3d I only needed a few hours to work out the scenes in 3d. It looked good and was easy to import and fit inside the editor replacing the old art.

The thing that really succeeded with my chosen game type was the ease to create storyboards in the game editor I used and transform it to the final game.

To read more visit my LD29 blog.

To play the game visit the LD29 entry

Tags: Beneath the Surface, gamecreator, incourse, islandworks, ld29, ld48, Ludumdare, strong99, troubling times

Here is the link to my game : http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=29515

I’m mixed for this jam. On the one hand, i like the game i made, on the other hand i wish i could made a better and a longer game.

Working

First, i have learn to never work with someone when you don’t know his capacity. I lost a lot of time and i didn’t know where i was going because of his inexperience. (I didn’t blame him, it’s was cool to work with him.)

Then i was too ambitious, so the game tooks me one week to finish everything i planned.

And I need to organize myself better in code and for tasks to be relax when i work.

The Game

My first goal was to give a real adventure feeling  (like in Thief : the Dark Project) for a 2D game.

So I think the two first part of my game should be better with a step by step gameplay : i mean you don’t control the boat or the diving bell but the character and you have to do different actions for get where you want.

The story was not clear and a lot of people didn’t know what to do, i have to think about it next time.

I know the diving bell controls are frustrating, i was trying to do something cool, but i failed :D.

Finally here is the three features i wanted to implement to the game :

-Pad control

-More living World

-Better transitions between levels and text on the screen.

For the rest i’m proud of the result because i learned a lot.

Thanks for your reading.

Striwx

Concepts art by LeHobbit