HELLO
I just uploaded a [POST COMPO] version. this version removes the increase of dificulty for the monsters as time progresses, and the people meet limit is 30 instead of 50, and you only need to do 20 at the beggining, and also some other minor fixes.
DO NOT RATE THIS ONE, THAT IS CHEATING
It is just meant to address the problems i didnt have time to fix in the compo version. And so people can enjoy the game even more!
THANK YOU!!
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=24705
I ended up very happy with my first submission to Ludum Dare. It started from a simple idea: What if every step you took could come back to haunt you? What if, in the world of flicker, time is as malleable as clay?
I managed to get everything I wanted to in the game – I made sure to keep it simple.
Yet the main mechanic behind the game is one I want to explore a little more – its like a diamond half buried in the dirt. I feel like if I keep digging, I’ll be able to mine quite a bit out of this game.
So, I am going to continue development and hopefully do a full release in the next month or two!
Here is what I am planning to add:
– Bug fixes/ under the hood improvements to make adding new gameplay elements easier.
– More feedback when you accomplish something. The issue I found players were having was that it was hard to realize that when you enter a light, it actually damages the “big baddies”. So, to illustrate this better, I put a counter on each enemy that ticks down everytime you get a light, and I also am adding animations where the light “reaches out” and actually hits the enemies that can receive damage.
-Bosses and enemy types. I want the game to keep surprising you, so I have designed, and am planning to implement ten new enemy types. All the types of enemy are going to be very different, and eventually they will begin coming in different combinations. If you consider ONLY the combinations of two enemies, that is 100 different attack combinations. I am very excited for these guys, they are already looking pretty sweet.
-Balancing, balancing, balancing. Since I am adding so much new content, I want to make sure the game is balanced, and the player will get a chance to experience all the game has to offer. I have already begun work on this by cutting the enemy spawn rate in half so games have a chance to last longer. The best scores I hear from players were in the mid-30s, which is very short. I want the game to be something you can get lost in, just spend time in this world. If that is going to happen, it needs to progress in difficulty much slower.
-Graphical overhaul. I am already very happy with the art style, but I feel like it can be improved – I am going to completely re-do the graphics ONCE the game is content-complete.
-Music. The music drives this game – the music and sounds are essential, and what I worked hardest on. I am going to keep all the sound effects I made, because I liked them alot, but I am going to rerecord the song, and add different parts to it. The song was made in a simple audio editor, and was improvised in about an hour, from conception to completion. I am going to spend a bit more time on it, and add quite a few progressions for when different enemies come, etcetera. THEN the final piece of the puzzle: a little script that adds a tick to the game based on the BPM of the song. Then I can tick the enemies movements to the music, and the sounds they make will meld perfectly with the song. This is probably the feature I am most excited for: it will be a new territory that I am exploring so I hope it works out well.
All I can say is, the feedback I have been receiving is tremendous. Thanks for the support, and I hope you all play the full version once its released!
Until then,
Dan
Hello All!
Last weekend was my second Ludum Dare, and it was quite an experience again. Vibrastones, the game I made, divides the playspace in two. On one side you have a small box containing an abstract platforming level. Outside of that box, there are stones. If you click on on any platform or stone, it will emit a tone. You drag the stones over each other to make tones matching the platforms. This moves or scales the platforms to make the game playable. I basically interpreted “Connected Worlds” as connected play spaces. So how did it go?
What went right?
Concept: I had a hard time brainstorming this time around. Last time, I had about 10 ideas after 15 minutes. This time, it was over two hours to come up with two ideas. Those became one idea, and this was it. That being said, iterating on a single idea, instead of choosing from a list, benefitted the game. I think this is more interesting than something I would have just spat out without iteration.
Scope: I am apparently a good judge of my own skills. I have been using Unity for a while, but I don’t really do it all the time. So, I have to keep things pretty simple. That being said, I finished things almost exactly when I thought I would. I am pleased with the time management on that. Trello helped a ton on that end.
Sound: I am pretty happy with the tones I created. I based all of the synth arpeggiations on a Tristan chord, which created an interesting and ambiguous tone. The actual playbacks are a little bugged, but I’ll get to that in the next section.
Sleep: I decided to get to bed at 1 AM on saturday, and get a solid 6-7 hours. My work on Sunday was much more efficient as a result. I also made a lot less mistakes thanks to being well rested.
Visual polish: OK so it isn’t gorgeous, and I never did get to touching up the yellow stone. However, I am glad I took the time to polish up some of the assets, and create backgrounds, title screen, etc… It looks rushed (because it was), but I think it makes the game feel more complete.
Tool Selection: I used tools I have worked with before, and serve my purposes well. Unity, LSDJ ASEPRITE, GIMP, and Audacity are my go to tools. I threw iTween in as well. It is a good enough tweening library, but unfortunately I will be including it in my “what went wrong” section. I am glad I went with tools I could get up and running in quickly. I don’t really keep a library of unity scripts, but at this point I can get up and running pretty quickly. It really helped me not get bogged down, just getting the first prototype running.
What went wrong?
Sleep: OK I know I included this in the first part as well. On Friday, the theme was announced at 9PM for me. I worked until around 6 am, slept for about 3 hours, and got back to work. MISTAKE. I was slow, and prone to typos. I also had trouble finding those typos. The extra sleep would have netted me hours. Lesson learned.
Sound implementation: I am not going to get into the nuts and bolts of how the sounds are played, but it’s glitchy. It often just stops after one stone is removed from a stack, even if there are other stones in the stack. I needed to come up with a smarter playback system. I also heard some complaints about the volume level. I should have made an audio slider or something.
Level Design: I haven’t done a ton of level design, and I really should have spent more time on this. Of the 5 levels I made, at least the first two can be passed just by stacking all of the stones. I know how I can fix this, but it was just too late at the time.
Puzzle design: Trial and error works too well. If I had added even one more stone, it would have increased the possible combinations enough to make trial and error inefficient. Similarly, the game only supports pairs of stones. If it could also support combos of 3 or 4 stones, this would also increase the possibilities. At a point, I think this would stop players from using trial and error, and force them to actually listen to the tones.
Platformer controls: The way I am detecting if the platformer player character is grounded is a bit sloppy. So jumping can be a little weird, and sometimes you cannot jump when you should be able to. It was a last minute solution to keep the player from floating through the level.
Sloppy code: At some point like 30 hours in I just stopped paying attention my naming conventions. Please don’t look at my source. THE HORROR. If I want to continue work on this (and I do), I have a LOT of cleanup to do.
iTween: I basically did a “Hello World” with iTween prior to the compo, but had never used it before. MISTAKE. Ultimately, I couldn’t call the iTween events the way I wanted to, so I had to do 90% of the animations in the Unity animator. It isn’t a bad tool itself, I just really wanted to try out iTween. I am using the Shake Rotation tween, which works well enough for my purposes. This isn’t really a criticism of the tool, but I should have spent more time with it prior to LD.
Collision detection on stones: The stones are meant to have a bit of an aura, so they collide a bit before the sprites are touching. This is inconsistent at best, and makes the vibrations look really glitchy. I very much need to clean that up.
Conclusion
Overall I am happy with the results, and I will probably continue with development on the project. There is some level of novelty to the concept, and I think I can make some nasty little puzzles with it. This was, again, a great learning experience, especially in terms of finding my limitations. I will spend the next four months improving, and see you all for Ludum Dare 31. Oh, and please check out and rate my game! http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=34376 Thanks for reading!
Starpiercer now has standalone Win/Mac/Linux builds! Playing fullscreen in 1920x1080 is more recommended.
Play the game and vote for us if you enjoy it on our page.
Yours, Schrödinger Games.
First of all, I want to work on what was on the original plan and I didn’t have enough time to do:
– add Title Screen
– add Intro
– add The End: basically, a text that indicates the end of the game… a happy ending ^^
– add instructions: an arrow/something that indicates where to go.
– add music
– add more sounds
– add more sprites (car, dog, flowers…)
– improve collisions
– fix bugs
Besides, I’m considering to work on new ideas, some of them based on the feedbacks:
– make the bee bigger
– change some details on the final dialog to be more natural/friendly and less awkward 😛
– add a Time Trial Versus Mode (with new characters)
Well, I think that’s it… for now 😀
I’ve decided to record gameplay video from my augmented reality game and LD#30 entry 😉 Yes, I know I look silly playing 
A machine from another time has entered your possession.
You activate it, but it demands ability-enhancing technology that hasn’t been invented yet.
Are your reflexes and multi-tasking up to unlocking the secrets within? Try United Nanolytics Knowledge Vault //
United Nanolytics Knowledge Vault
Team Fumiko here – we just wanted to let you all know that we were happy to take part in this ludum dare. We are a loose team of about 4 people. Two programmer, an artist and a levelbuilder – while the other three were already working together on a game I (artist) kinda just dropped in.
This was the first GameJam I did 3D for and even though I’d probably would have felt more safe in a 2D environment I’m glad I took the chance to test out my workflow.
At first we didn’t really like the theme and where about to make something like a spacetrader or infinity runner. Ironically I saw many games like that – so we kinda dodged a bullet when our lead-programmer and master of design came up with a new concept on a hunch.
Let’s make a dungeon crawler in which you compete for the loot. This was our new base idea. Our leveldesigner turned rad and built a level in blender which by no means was fitting for a dungeoncrawler. However the obstacleparcouring plattformer-madness that was this level gave an enitrely new flair to the concept. We went with a digital design theme and created our connected world.
While programming made big steps on the first day, I started a way too detailed character for my skills as an 3D-Artist – since I never really did hardsurfacemodelling it took me even more time and at the end of the day I had nothing else to show but one character (which I got padded on the back for though! So yay! ). Coremechanics were programmed only with cubes (dem bouncy cubes, man…) – however everything seemed to get along well.
The second day I started to get productive and meshed out most of the enemies, chests and coins in just a few hours. Sadly some of the team had to take time off for personal matters and we had some trouble because some found nothing to further contribute to the project while our two programmers shouldered all the pressure. This was before we knew that there was a Jam/Relaxed type of entry – so we thought we were on our last day already and because we did everything from scratch and most of us couldn’t resist trying out new stuff – quite some things were buggy. On the later evening programming became the ol’ tryanderror procedure – which as many of you will know does NOT make anyone happy. We fell behind schedule (not that we had one – but we regulary recapped what was done and what HAD to be done) so that we couldn’t really relaxed when we got the information about the knew deadline. (I’m kinda at fault because I asked our programmer to help out with animations – stripping him of time for his other work)
The last day was tough. Moral hit rock bottom – however we forced all the manpower we had available into this – as all art was done for the game and even additional stuff like handdrawn bumpmaps (because yaay! /o/ ) I downloaded Unity and got told how to help out with filling the level with entities and later on assigning every triggerable thing with a unique ID – which are a staggering amount of about 3oo units.
In the end everything depended on our leadprogrammer. All the features existed but had yet to be implemented into each other. He got it all working just minuts before the final deadline and the beginning of the extra submission hour. Done. He wasn’t happy. I tried to cheer him up – but his mood was shitty. He gave it his all and we both knew some things were still bugging out.
However after a day of him being grumpy he surprised everyone by having fixed the onlinescript for the game today and we’re happy to announce that our game is… pretty darn fun.
It is an online plattformer with emphasis on collecting coins during a ten minute match with an solid drop in drop out mechanic. To experience our vision of the game come join us when we play in the server – or invite some friends to try it out. We compiled a stable web-build which makes dropping in pretty fast and fun. Collect coins, find the fastest routes to chest and slay your way to being the player with the most coins. Join me at 5 – 6 PM GMT+2 when I try to beat my girlfriend in the game I worked on. You’d be very welcome to check out our game during that time to experience the multiplayer (or any other time for that matter)
tl;dr: try our game – it’s great!
+ don’t give artist accountrights to presentationplattforms – we’re way too much attentionhuggerly (totally a word) to be left without proper supervision.
Hi everyone the game I created for this LD is ‘When Worlds Collide‘
You can play, rate & brutally criticize it here!
Direct unity web player link here!
No this is not real space, it’s honestly a gameplay screenshot. Believe it son.
Mechanics :
– Randomly generated solar systems, planets, moons etc.
– Hover your mouse over planets to see planet name, planet population, and planet wealth
– Grapple multiple planets to haul them around the solar system
– Solar system radar displaying location of planets and the sun
– Player health
– Destructible planets and moons
– Dogfight with enemy fighters (pretty tough; got it in last minute)
Keys :
– ‘Spacebar‘ = Grapple planets
– ‘F’ = Fullscreen
– ‘Enter/Return’ = shoot
– ‘R’ = Create new solar system
– ‘WASD’ = Move up, left, down, right
– ‘Left Click’ = Hide controls
– ‘Mouse Hover’ = View planet information
This one is actually a picture of real space.
Extra :
The game is a little rough, but I feel pretty confident with how much content I got into it. There isn’t a definitive goal but it’s still an interesting free roam concept
It’d be awesome if you guys & gals would check it out and tell me what you think and give it a rate. And again, criticism is encouraged. Have a good one!
– Follow Me : @OfficialDingbat
Tags: 2D, 2d unity, 30Jam, connected worlds, final, gamedev. indiedev, jam, LD30, nips, OfficialDingbat, post-mortem, screenshot, unity, unity3d, update, webplayer
You can play and rate my game here
Back in LD#26 , I made a crappy puzzle game that was neither finished nor fun. In LD#27, I finally made a finished game called “10 second roguelike”. Although it only ranked #450, I received a lot of comments that were both helpful and inspiring. It was nice to hear others enjoyed your game especially when you are not a professional game developer. It was also really satisfying to see other people played my game. Therefore, I decided to join this Ludum Dare again to have some fun and yea it was definitely a hell lot of fun.
I decided that I would make a strategy or tycoon game this time around since I’ve never made one and I love strategy games. I was hoping the theme would be Alchemy or Fortress but it turns out Connected Worlds is a also great theme for making a strategy game (as you can see from so many entries being a tycoon game). My game was inspired by a super old KOEI game call Aerobiz Supersonic (yes, I love old KOEI games as you can see from my attempted to remake Uncharted Horizon 2).
Let’s now talk about what went well and what went wrong in this LD.
=== Things that went well ===
– Using an iterative approach was good because it turns out I have to throw away A LOT of the original design due to time limit
– Try out new things. I used Java + Libgdx which I was familiar with but I had never made a tycoon game nor that I know how to use scene2D to create GUI and I learned a lot.
– Play testing is important. I finished early as a jam entry because I was aiming to get into the compo, but it turned out to be good because the first comment pointed out I had some game crushing bugs. It also let me have time to play test it myself which enables me finding out my original version was way too simple.
– Music is important. It made my game feel much better after I added background music.
– Getting into flow. At some point I lost track of time and it felt great to keep on coding. I was amazed by how much I had done when I finished. I also need to thank my girlfriend for her support
– Separating the data with the game logic simplified my play testing because I only need to run the game again to see the changes I made.
=== Things that did not went well ===
– Time Management. I was aiming to get into the compo but I ran out of time to replace the place holder arts I found on the Internet.
– Poor Tutorial. I thought it should be easy for people to learn the game because I included in-game help info. It turned out I did a poor job and everyone complained about the game having a really steep learning curve at the start.
– No test run before start. Libgdx changed a bit since last time I used it and the documentation wasn’t kept up to date. I spent quite some time fiddling with the code to get some of the GUI element right.
– Forgot to buy groceries before the compo. I ran out of food to cook during the day and I had to go out and buy stuff which made me lose an hour of coding.
– Need more play testing when making a strategy game. I still feel my game is too easy.
Overall, I had a great time last weekend and I will definitely come back for the next ludum dare!
So, I rolled out my LD 30 entry, and there was quite some buzz about it, judging from the number of rankings placed as well as the coolness rating. And to be honest, I would have expanded everything in this visual novel — especially when I read the comments section and taking the criticisms to heart. As a solo participant, I knew very well the brunt of writing the full story line beforehand, coding the entire thing in Ren’Py, making the backgrounds and UI, and reading the entire thing over and over again to catch bugs and grammatical errors — all in three days.
Hopefully, within this year, I will give e|merge the polish it so deserves. Here are some things to be done.
1. Expansion of the story is first priority. 1,800 words is not enough to convey the melodrama I wanted to impart, combined with the theme. Without handing out spoilers, I will definitely iron out some kinks and plot holes for maximum clarification.
2. Rework the UI. One comment stated that the text did not make full use of the game (or quite not the game)’s 1366 x 768 resolution. Fortunately, Ren’Py’s NVL mode allows room for fully-customized NVL windows, as demonstrated in a recent favorite visual novel of mine, Sepia Tears.
3. Some hints of interaction would be nice. Name inputs? Choices? Anything interactive can apply — as long as it does not mess with the essence of the story.
So there. Expect a new and improved e|merge some time this year. Excuse me while I’m still recovering from flu.
I just finished the post-compo version of my LD game, Greener Grass!
The original version of the game was too hard, which is a good thing. The only problem was that I was throwing all of the mechanics at the player at once, creating five identical levels that were really fun but had no difficulty curve. To fix that, I’ve adjusted the spawn rates for each level in the post-compo version, increasing the difficulty for each level so that level 4 has the same difficulty as the original version. Also, it was kind of dumb that missing one jump could kill you and send you back five levels, forcing you to go through the whole thing all over again, so I’ve instituted a three-lives system.
Just in case those decisions are too humanitarian, though, I’ve added a new hazard in levels 5 and 6: fireballs.
This was a bug. The actual post-compo version will have at least 10% less fireballs.
You can download the post-compo version from my entry’s page. And feel free to play and rate the original first! 😉
Hello everyone, the game I helped make for Ludum Dare 30 is Spirit Shift – a multidimensional infinite runner. Programming by myself (Connor Halford) and Rachel Crawford, art by Cameron Moore and Tobias Cook. We’re all currently students at Abertay University in Dundee, Scotland and this is the first project any of us have worked on together. This is my first jam and everyone else’s second.
Development went fairly smoothly, though the view shifting and camera work took a long time to get right. I think we’re all pretty happy with the result. I’ll likely be posting more detailed breakdowns later, but for now enjoy this gameplay footage and of course have a go at the game yourself!
I was watching AtomicVikings (metaldemon) llivestream a bunch of live plays of Ludum Dare games today. Now I want to livestream, but I haven’t figured out how yet. However, I will do the next best thing. I will live chat with you as I play the game. ( Well, maybe it’s not the next best thing, but hay, it’s something. lol) Anyway, find me here — https://chatbox.com/#/p=37IWBvYRvRI=A-2-WnDtHXdIa4ifldlOxPn3WHY= — at 5:00 am UTC (2 hours from now), or so. I’ll be there for a couple of hours tonight. If it goes well, I’ll do more tomorrow, too.
(Also, perhaps someone could talk me through setting up a livestream, maybe??)
So I survived my first Ludum Dare. I got my game finished in 48 hours and dropped unconscious immediately after…lol. Actually this was a fantastic experience but I’ll get back to that. In the end I developed a dimension hopping platformer called PRISM.
Tools
I feel like I did a pretty decent job predicting the scope of the work I needed to do. I was watching the #LD48 tweets before the jam and there was one that really stuck with me from @beeglebug:
1. Think of an idea
2. Think of a smaller one
3. Reduce the scope
4. Reduce it some more
5. Finish it!
Anyway, totally did the trick for me. I shotgunned a bunch of ideas and picked one. Then I came up with as many concepts for that idea as I could. I picked from those lists the things I thought we possible for me to do in that time frame and ran with it.
SpriteSomethingI hadn’t even planned on using this, I intended to do most of my sprite work in Pixen. As it turned out, I spent a lot more time than I wanted to out of the house and I ended up doing the majority of my sprites from my iphone/ipad.
The musicIt worked out better than I thought it would. I wrote it rather quickly and was worried it would be more of an annoying distraction than add to the game. In the end I was pleased with how it turned out so I left it in.
What Went WrongBugs, like the player rendering before the tilemap, made him appear behind the scenery rather than infront in certain places, and my collision detection and controls could have been tighter. Definitely needed more play testing.
The yellow level was too easy. I originally wanted to make the teleport work as long as you were unobstructed, and fire off like a beam. If the beam hit something you’d materialize early. In the end I didn’t have time so I made it so you could teleport directly to the mouse pointer.
The green level, was suppose to have zombies which you’d be able to shoot with a new ability in that world. Again, low on time I opted to put spikes as the moving element for that level. I left the zombie sprite in the assets directory anyway…didn’t have the heart to take him out…sniff.
Also, I wish I did a timelapse, seeing everyone elses looks so cool. I kinda wish I had done one too, it’s neat watching a game take shape out of nothing.
I absolutely loved this experience. It was exciting and tense, and I had a great sense of accomplishment by the end of it. Hearing the feedback and playing other peoples games has been really great. I learned a lot from developing my game, but I think I probably learned even more playing games by the other developers. Picked up a bunch to new tools and techniques and can’t wait to try them out. It’s a great community and was fun to be a part of it, hopefully this will be the first of many ludum dares.
Got some great feedback so far, and have implemented a bunch of changes. Some of them aren’t 100% tuned yet, but it’s getting there. Thanks to everyone who has played and given feedback so far!
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=7424
(original for ratings, and post-compo version linked for future enjoyment :))
Well, that was fun.
I’ve never made a game like this before, or, I’d never really finished one, so getting the chance to do it was great. I felt very motivated this time around. However, I must admit that the game’s not in the ideally finished state for me. Where the game only has 3 levels, I was hoping for 5, and I never got to include anything like keys and locks, or even a possible time limit on the levels. (Which would have made the stun from falling relevant.) So, because of this, I have to do some introspection.
What went wrong?
Time: 3 hours is not as long as you think. When I found myself thinking I had 9 hours left and I’d be fine, I got a little nagging feeling that it would pass by very quickly without me getting anything done. My intuition was correct, and I was only able to just finish. Act like all time is crunch time, and don’t spend so much time in the IRC .
Level design: Oh goodness. I decided to design the levels using the Tiled software, and I was very satisfied, but when I exported a file, I realized that I wasn’t sure about parsing the files. So, what I did was export to JSON, and just cut out anything I didn’t need, leaving the comma-separated-values that were easy to parse. Later, I wanted to add objects aside from the player that move independent of the tile grid, so I had to make up a format for that, and append it to the level file. So, every time I was making a change to a level, I had to export it, open up the file, strip the junk, and add the object data. This isn’t efficient, and level design depends on rapid iteration. Next time find a library or something that can parse it.
Poor code design: Global state everywhere, duplicated code, and like one comment that says “//Player Status. OOPify later” followed by a list of previously mentioned holders of global state. The result of all this? Extremely unreadably, buggy code. Consider actually OOPifying from the start.
What went right?
Time: As much as I felt like I wasted some of my time, when it was approaching the deadline, I was on fire. I figured I had a problem and like magic the solution was already being added to the code. I don’t think I’ve ever felt the feeling of just making so much progress like that. I felt like I finally knew what to cut out and what to keep in.
Motivation: Whenever I felt like a problem actually was getting to me, I decided to get up, and go for a walk. I’m not sure if this ended up saving time, but I felt like pulling my hair out less.
Not reinventing the wheel: I knew I’d have trouble reimplementing a tilemap class, so I took the one I put up on GitHub some months before. That was a huge timesaver.
Previous artistic experience: When I was younger, I never could make games, but I always was fascinated with the look of games. As a result, I spent a lot of time in Paint.NET, just making textures that’d never be used. That was really handy.
Knowing your tools: I’ve been using SFML for a while now, and I understand the ins and outs, and leading up to the competition, I made sure I knew how to use Tiled. (Just not its formats. :P)
Poor code design: In the end, I realize that there’s actually no time for sensible design in the game’s code. Though the code I produced isn’t that maintainable as a whole, it still works, and that’s what matters. This jam has taught me what it means to make a game and not something like an engine.
Conclusion
I had a lot of fun for my first Ludum Dare. Though it was stressful, it was also very exciting, and knowing now my weaknesses and strengths, I feel like I’m more prepared for next time. It was a good time.
After submitting my game with nobody other than myself testing it was apparent that the difficulty was a bit much. So I decided to do a little bit of fine tuning for those that want a less frustrating time. You can play this updated version here: http://mactinitegames.com/ludum-dare-30-interplanetary/
And if you could, play and rate my game here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=26320
Please rate my game based on the compo version and not the new one I posted on my site. Thank you!
Tags: update
Had a lot of fun this Ludum Dare; theme was great, and the game idea came pretty immediately.
If you haven’t played, well, why not?
Tools:
Convergence is a (very) short multi-dimensional puzzle/story game, where you switch between dimensions to reveal paths/hide obstacles. It drew some inspiration from the early levels of Half-Life 1, where the aliens were invading through rifts in space. The difference being that you were being torn between nearly-parallel dimensions, instead of being a bad-ass scientist.
It was originally intended to be a mechanic you could activate at will, but many puzzles became problematic due to the fact that I wanted to avoid jumping puzzles (they aren’t good in first person!). This led to most puzzles being completable in seconds.
So, like every Ludum Dare, the mechanics took a big ol’ midway change, and now the dimensions are changed by activating a pedestal. This prevents a lot of the problems, because the pedestal is only interactable in it’s designated dimension, much like the puzzle elements. Unfortunately, since all the levels were designed around the original idea (and didn’t work with the new method), I had to scrap everything, and with barely any time left, I only had time to make 1 ‘puzzle’. But, the mechanics work in a pretty simple way now, so it’d be easy to make levels after more design work.
This was the first game I’ve made with dialogue. It wasn’t very good. I recorded it in the final couple of hours, after I had been awake for 27+ hours at that point. I recorded with Audacity, adjusted the pitch, treble & bass, as well as amplified then reduced to add distortion (albeit only a little). Then some reverb was added, and even more was added inside of Unity with an Audio Zone.
Audio was triggered by invisible trigger zones, which doubled as ‘event’ zones, too (like the first time the dimensions switch).
I’m not a fan of unnecessary HUD elements and tutorials, so I tried to incorporate them naturally into the game. The controls are written on a sign on a wall in the beginning, in the style of a safety advisory board, and the voice-over lets you know you can open doors. Rather than having an indicator telling you what dimension you are in, you can pretty easily tell, since the walls will change colors. Looks much better than an icon 😉
The levels were made with a Unity asset called Prototype (a cheaper, but reduced version of ProBuilder), which allows you to take a primitive (like a cube), and extrude faces, rotate them, etc., to create neat-o geometry. This is a vital tool for me, because I don’t know how to model with ‘standard’ software, like Blender, or 3DS Max. I built 3 rooms, a tunnel, and a crosspath, and simply reused them to create the levels. I also created the cryo-pods with the same tool.
Because I was taking part in the Dare, and the source needed to be provided (and because I also like to include the builds), I exported all the models made with Prototype into OBJ files, then reimported them. Unfortunately, they weren’t named properly, so it’s impossible to tell which model name is what, without checking it manually (sorry to anyone who looks at the source!)
The human models were created with a free program called MakeHuman, which does exactly what you’d think it does. They’re even rigged, but I’m about as good at animating as I am modelling, so they just float there… In stasis…
The textures were all made in Paint.NET, with the black tiles simply being an inverted duplicate of the white tiles. The Purger used the black tiles for his emmittence effect, and his wings(?) were made from a different texture. That effect was actually completely accidental, but I liked it a lot so I altered his design to incorporate it more.
The worlds were switched pretty simply – I had a public bool called ‘currentWorld’, and the idea was that ‘true’ meant you were in the normal world, and ‘false’ was the ‘other’ world. The texture of the walls were changed based on this bool. A separate script was attached to each mesh renderer that was world-dependent, and changed the alpha value of its material based on the world. If it was a true world object, and the currentWorld was false, the alpha would be lowered. If not, it would be completely visible. This made it super-easy to set up which objects should be visible when.
It also made it super easy to determine which sounds to play, since all the sounds were added to the same GameObject.
Overall, I’m happy with this game. It’s much shorter than I’d like, and it’s not at the quality I’d like, but everything was present – audio, textures, dialogue, gameplay, etc.
I’d like to use the boss in something else later on, since he’s my favourite part of this whole thing!
Looking forward to the next Ludum Dare!
The Lion’s Song is a short-story format Point & Click Adventure made in Adventure Game Studio. It shows a perspective of the early 1910’s just before the war.
You play as Wilma, a composer who moved to the Austrian Alps to find inspiration there. But a storm lurking over the valley prevents her from going out. And so the only contact to the outside world is a new-fashioned device – the telephone (for emergencies only ;)).
What is absolutely amazing to me is that Kill Screen Mag has already written a short article regarding The Lion’s Song.
Also videogamenostalgia.com wrote a short post about the game.
I sincerely hope that some of you will like it. There are many comments saying that people liked it already and I’m hoping for more. I’d also appreciate feedback and ratings. Thank you for your time!
