I did it guys! My first “completed” game ever! It’s not perfect, my weekend was busy so I couldn’t do a lot (I couldn’t put any audio in :(), but it’s up and working.
The character Maggie wields a powerful weapon capable of creating remote magnetic fields. She uses this to escape a bat infested cave!
Here is my submitted game: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-32/?action=preview&uid=50824
Of all The Genre I choose to make with the Unreal Engine I went with a map transition Turn Based JRPG… And that was hard!
I had an idea on how to make it work and I have worked on a JRPG system with UE4 before. I got ideas jolted down, set up a very basic movement and menu, and started working on setting up the system thinking it would take me about a couple of hours to get set up. I know I want to keep it simple so I wanted to make the menu and the battle system very basic.
However that didn’t happen for when I actually learn that making the battle system was complex to it’s simplest form.
It took me a whole day or more were I thought it would have taken me hours and before i know it it was already monday. I have underestamated it’s scope of my jam project and only finish 1/3 of my battle system. And since I have class on Monday I only know I have less time to actually add More art, music and Sfx.
I was thinking of not submitting my game knowing I won’t have time to add all that in, but I choose to submitted anyways knowing it missing alot of stuff and it’s going to fail. I think I might continue working on my game to completion some time in the future.
Even thought I have regretted on choosing a genre it was a great learning experiance for me knowing what are my limits plus I know more than ever on making the JRPG battle system.
Lets not try to make a JRPG Game with half of the know how in a Game Jam next time. *Goes back making that JRPG game in UE4*
Crazy? is only your imagination!
Thanks for playing
Food Fighter 2000 was created for the Ludum Dare 32 Jam Competition, the theme was Unconventional Weapon. Please play the game and rate it here.
http://bit.ly/1Dw4te0
(I do not know why my GIF are turning green?)
What Went Right
Brainstorming – we do this as a family at the Dinner Table after we find out the theme. As always this was full of wonderful ideas, but it was Mom’s idea that one out in the end. An Unconventional Weapon that would fire food instead of bullets.
Artwork – my two son’s Simon and Marting (10 and 7) did 90% of the Artwork for the game. They used Gimp to first draw what the sprites would look like, and then we imported the image into Qubicle, where they would Voxelize them, and add details. Sometimes they made them too big (the Taco) and we would have to scale them into the game. But overall it turned out great.
Rest – I like to get plenty of rest during these events, and this was no exception. The latest I stayed up was 1:30 in the morning. I have learned from experience that coding at 4:00 am is pointless, and gets nothing accomplished (take heed Junior #gamedev).
Snacks – good selection of snacks, and of course Coke (Mexican with real cane sugar only please)
Working with the Boys – it was great to work with 2 of my boys during this, they were a great help (see artwork) and very helpful with ideas.
Sounds – although added last, my 7 year old did all the sound effects for the game and they were awesome!
What Went Wrong
Unity/Html5 – I REALLY wanted to publish this in HTML5 so I spent WAY TOO LONG putzing with performance stuff because @Unity3d was rendering too slow. In hindsight, I probably should have given up sooner than I did to fallback to the Web Player.
Indecision – I was torn between a Mesh Pathing system versus an Object based Waypoint system. The Waypoint System (SMS) was victorious – still I wasted a lot of time deciding. Overall I like how it turned out, although I am not too sure how well it will scale when we add other levels.
Rotation – I don’t know why but I had all kids of trouble getting the Rotation of the player to work right. I might have been the anchor of the Voxel models, but regardless, I finally got it but again took way too long.
Music – well I FINALLY created my own master piece, and it shows. I used cgMusic to create the original score, and then used FL Studio to clean it up and add some things here and there. Overall the music is awful, but I made it.
Gameplay – did not get the rules down, and the gameplay suffered. We were making stuff up at the last minute, and it shows.
Bugs – there are lots of bugs, people going thru walls, things exploding when they should not. It’s all in good fun though.
What New Thing Did We Learn
Voxelization – It was simply awesome to work with Voxels -spriting in 3 dimensions. I had some reasons for wanting to make the game this way (can’t say right now) but it gave me an opportunity to test some things out while Jamming.
Music Man – I can make music, I just need to do some more work at it.
Final Thoughts
This was another fun event, I just love doing these Jams because i feel they make me a better overall at #gamedev. I sure liked the theme, one of the better ones in a while.
Still, there are some things I would do different next time:
Clear Your Game Rules – get your rules down on paper – stick to it.
Less is More – removing stuff is okay, adding stuff is not.
Sound Better – know the sounds you need, find them or make them.
Move Along – if you cannot figure something out, move onto the next thing if you can. If you can’t then just do something different and then come back to it later.
Till Next Time,
The Hockers
It’s time for another livestream where we play your entries!
If you want us to play your jam/compo entry, use the form below!
We will only stream on the Tuesday April 21st today.
Stream start in the Afternoon(CEST)
Follow us on Twitter! We will tweet when we go live.
On Livecoding.tv
https://www.livecoding.tv/atomicvikings/
Submit your game here
http://goo.gl/VX33cR
http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-32/?action=preview&uid=25123
Twitter: @AtomicVikings
Tags: AtomicVikings, livecoding, livestream
So I started Ludumdare last weekend worked the first day of it then gave up on getting done on time. I suppose I could have finished something VERY SHORT repetitive and arcady with the amount I had finished; but all I had was roughly 9 seconds of gameplay and the amount of time it took made me feel very disheartened about the idea of finishing it in the time frame.
I’m now looking at what I had done on the project and the full project idea and considering if it’s worthwhile to finish or not.
First; what there is: Video. Preview.
Basically the player will hit a half-pipe about 3 seconds after starting; have half a second in the air to pull a 180 [+/- 10 degrees] and land it (or else they wipe out); that’s about it.
What went wrong to cause that to take so much time?:
Though I’m trained in 3DS Max, I never really made the transition to Blender after I lost my 3DS Software License. I was trying to code 3D models and animations by hand. It works and I understand the math behind it well enough to do it; it’s just slow and difficult compared to using the software. For example; that skateboard is this lovely piece of code.
Writing the Triangles is particularly annoying; that long array of numbers is crucial to how the level is actually drawn. Notice also that the model doesn’t really have any normals. I just called “mesh.RecalculateNormals();” to not give it complete crap; but default normals like that doesn’t light anywhere near as well as good normals would. Since Unity uses normals by vert instead of normals by triangle trying to get the right angles would both be time consuming and require lots of vertex duplication; which I didn’t have time to go through.
Anyways; though I could do that; making the skateboard animate correctly to not clip through the half-pipe [Which is literally defined with the equation y=0.5x^2 for a period of y=0 to y=1] was proving pretty impossible (especially since the position of the skateboard was controlled by one script and the rotation by another [out of necessity, unfortunately]). With fresh eyes it occurs to me that if I rendered the objects on seperate layers I could have more easily gotten ‘close enough’ and ran with that.
In short I wasn’t really using the right tools and the method I’d rigged together was rather inefficient.
The rest of the game was more complicated physics and though it seemed simpler (except animations, perhaps) after all the issues I’d had up to that point I didn’t feel like continuing to slog through it.
On the positive side:
1. I think I’ve proven that I understand how to manually right a mesh well enough that I could feasibly write some fair procedural mesh generation for situations where it’s more necessary (voxel systems; making Unity look like an old Sector shooter).
2. The candy-stripping on the boxes was a bit of a happy accident. I couldn’t make straight lines like the game the look was inspired by without duplicating vertices; which I didn’t want to do.
3. The level reader works pretty well and was a pretty cool idea. LevelData is saved as an image (Red = Direction, Green = Tile type, Blue = Height, Alpha = Unused, probably enemies IF they needed to be separate from Tile type [unlikely]) and reads into a ’tile’ class for easy parsing. In retrospect the tile class is only for coder ease and unnecessary; could just as easily have only parsed through color data live without the middleman eating memory. It draws the first test level from this; but for a longer game I’d probably have to make an actual level editor; because manipulating that much data in GIMP is both inefficient and confusing.
Learned?
Obviously that I need to use Blender and animation curves if I want to work in 3D again at any level of detail; manually writing by the numbers works; but is not efficient. That’s about it; I didn’t get far enough into gameplay balancing to learn/balance much else.
So what’s the actual idea:
In Short: Tile-based isometric platformer based around skateboarding.
Longer:
Double-tap left/right to jump left/right by one lane.
Press and hold to turn the board left/right.
Up/Down to speed up/slow down; but no stopping.
Space causes jumps one arbitrary unit into the air.
Space again while in the air bounces on the board and hit anything below you (unconventional weapon).
Space over a grind rail to follow it.
Navigate a deadly skatepark and dispatch all enemies that attack you.
Features include up/down slopes and twists. Swinging axes; firing turrets, which must be tricked into shooting themselves; crumbling platforms, etc.
You must dispatch all enemies to finish each level.
Up to 100 units of height variety.
Multiple cameras. (Possibly; if the one camera view restricts level design too much.
Speed control necessary to get proper jump length.
Notebooks:
Here are the notebook entries from this if anyone cares. It’s mostly just the math and mesh notes I had to write down wile handcoding the meshes.
Opinions on if I should finish this or not?
Done with my first LDJam!
Really happy with my work, but still unsure if its fun or if it makes any sense at all This is one of the most bizarre game I’ve ever made, and also one of the more difficult I’ve had to describe… The weapon is a magnifying glass. Its a two player coop game… both using the same controller. Which makes little sense. Anyway. I’m super sleepy. Votes and comments are welcome!
http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-32/?action=preview&uid=49641
The team is done with the submission for our second ludum dare, The Right Tool For The Job.
The game is based on using conventional weapons to accomplish everyday tasks in unconventional ways. You will use “tools” like swords and flamethrowers to extinguish a candle in a way very reminiscent of point-and-click adventure logic. Head on over to the game page and give it a go.
We had a lot of fun making this game and we’re looking forward to the next Ludum Dare already.
Together with garnanpacheco we achieved to make a fun game that can keep you entertained for several minutes. I was afraid we would just get negative feedback because of the jaggy physics, but in the last two days we managed to put together everything that, according to the comments so far, makes our game interesting to play.
At first I was afraid of going too crazy on the concept and that it would become unfeasable for our developing skills. Plus, it’s the first game that garnanpacheco has ever made on Unity, but he learned the tools really quickly and his previous programming skills were a huge help.
Pros:
Cons:
Our submission: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-32/?action=preview&uid=50202
Well well, how did that one go?
It’s not always easy to be a Panda-shark-man.
Considering we spend closer to 30 hours working rather than 72h and that I hadn’t touched multimedia fusion in over a year, not too bad.
Also, first time in ages not doing a platformer and leaving Art to someone else!
We kept the project simple enough though to limit risks. Pandarmageddon is a fairly classic top view survival brawler where you fight endless waves of increasingly tougher robots . What was cool was how you used both buttons of the mouse to use Pandarm and Sharkarm, one being a good damage dealer the other better as a crowd manager.
What went well:
* The game isnt too buggy. I’m an artist and not a coder, so that’s good.
* It took a while for the game to feel any fun at all and I almost abandonned it cause it didn’t seem to go anywhere by the end of saturday. At some point I said f*** it and decided to try to completely mess with the parameters and made the robots 200% faster. That helped a lot – just trying something that seemed silly and totally messed with the gameplay. It gave me a new perspective on how the game could go. The game felt a lot more intense and the shark suddenly became life saving.
* I think the sillyness of the game was fairly successful. I’m glad I had time to make the ennemy robots talk politely while trying to kill you as your character casually walk flailing shark and panda around.
* Jill’s music rocks and makes crushing robots way more epic. 😀
* The game has potentially interesting mechanics between the struggle to find food for your arms while keeping robots off but also while being really carefull not to step over UFO tractor beams! I was usually able to maintain two of those goals in mind and then mess up the 3rd one, I realized after playing a bunch I had to really focus to actually get a good score which is a good sign for a brainless brawler.
What sucked:
* Not finding the fun in the game earlier. I feel we could have had a lot more if we found it on the first day.
* Classic one but still true: not enough content. This kind of game is a lot more fun with many ennemy types and bonus. The game has 2 ennemies and a variation of one + 4 pick ups.
* general amateur feel of my coding.
* Multimedia fusion. Its OK for jams and prototypes but I’m not really learning anything useful using it. I gotta get to Unity!
* No combos :c
* Only one level
Overall it was a great LD, and I think we ll add a couple things to the game. There s a few funny ideas that can be explored with the conflict in between a vegetarian and a carnivorous arm!
Pandarmageddon:
http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-32/?action=preview&uid=12252
-blob
So I made “Animancer” for this LD and I’m pretty proud of the result. It’s an action platformer where you summon woodland animals to help you fight against the robot menace.
http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-32/?action=preview&uid=21927
Playthrough here: http://youtu.be/h5JT8bGcqKI
I think I learned a lot from my last game jam that I applied to this one. Namely that drawing in full color over the course of 48 hours when you have a pretty severe color-blindness is an exercise in futility. So I forwent the frustration this time and just made the entire game grey scale. After watching a pixel art stream by one of the makers of the game Crawl, I was inspired to do something much lower res than my last jam. It worked pretty well. Animating a run cycle when your legs are a single pixel wide makes things much more pleasant. Another thing that worked pretty well were the effects, of both the visual and sound variety. I did a couple of impact and explosion effects based on some ideas from 1Ship2ShipRedShiftBlueShift, which is another low res pixel art based game. The explosion technique is really easy to get right and something I would definitely not have come up with on my own. I wanted to have a classic SNES feel for the explosion sound effects, and I think it worked out by taking a recorded explosion sample, cutting it and speeding it up. The rest of the sound effects were also based off of real samples, and didn’t sound particularly good on their own, but with the addition of music and other sound effects they did their job just fine. The music is more dancy than anything I’ve ever done, but it turned out pretty good as well.
I still ran out of time though. I think somewhere around Saturday night, things started taking a lot longer than I expected. This meant not only a lack of sleep for that night, but it also bleed into the next day since at the end of the jam I only allotted myself about an hour and a half for level design. I didn’t get the chance to add some pretty important sound effects like hit reacts for the player and enemies. The hovering sound is pretty bad. Several of the animations were not tuned and had their default frame timings, so for example, the cat run cycle looks like it’s in slow motion. The environment art looks decent except for the foreground which is entirely composed of the same square black block everywhere in the game. I still haven’t managed to find the time to properly render out my characters. All of the robots are super flat looking like they were drawn in MSPaint (they weren’t). And then there’s the ever elusive screen shake and particle effects that I never seem to have the time to add in systems for.
All in all, I don’t think I learned as much as I did last time, but I think the end product is better. Next time I think I’m going to focus on making something more into the innovation category, and try to work on my pixel art shading.
Enter the Mayan temple deep in the Jungle to find out it’s secrets. Will there be treasure? And if so, will someone – or something – try to stop you from obtaining it? Luckily, you always have your trusty machette with you that no one will be able to steal from you … right?
Yum Kaax’s Relic is a game made for the Ludum Dare #32 Jam. It’s a top down adventure game where you have to find your way out of sticky situations, each time a little differently.
There is a Windows, Mac OSX, and Linux version ready to play.
Please leave a comment with your thoughts, and I’ll make sure to vote your game.
Enjoy, and with regards,
~Vivid
HIGH FIVERER: THE HIGH FIVENING
A game about high fives and the awesome power of friendship but also twitchy COMBO chains and extreme visual feedback!
I wasn’t sure I was even going to finish anything going in as this is only the third game I’ve worked on and my first JAM! This is also the first time using mouse input in anyway whatsoever. Thankfully I am very happy with the result and I had an absolute blast developing and streaming. I feel like I learned so much this weekend about design and development and I hope I can take to my current and upcoming projects.
Next time I would really love to get a team together or maybe try the compo?
Well, it was an exciting, challenging, and sleepless weekend of jamming, but Crystalline is done. I was able to try a lot of techniques that were new to me, make a much larger game than my first jam game in LD31, and actually have music and sound effects this time.
Thanks to everyone in the Ludum Dare community for being so inspiring, supportive, and creative. These jams push me to push myself, and I get hundreds of awesome games to play as a reward! I’m looking forward to checking out everyone’s work, but first it’s time to get some sleep!
I had created you tube playlist showing the development of the game ” e = i formulae “. i tried to do the live broad cast while working, due to low bandwidth internet i am unable to do that. Hence this video playlist
Play my game @ http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-32/?action=preview&uid=51981
Game Dev Blog @ http://paruthidotexe.blogspot.in/
Tags: paruthidotexe
Howdy my Texas friends ! And friends from that small other part of the world we call Outexas (the whole universe. Except the best part, the Texas)
Here is our Action Platformer game for this Game Jam: ScarKrow !
Be the first in your school to PLAY IT !
You’re a swaggy Krow using your own enchanted Feathers from your back to teleport to enemies and beat the sh*t out of them. And retrieve your lovely Cheese. Krows luv CheeZ.
Look all what you can do !
Teleportation !
—–
” I believe I can fly “
—–
M-m-m-m-Monster Aerial Chaotic COMBO !
—–
Go away monster ! Don’t separate me anymore from my cheese :'(
—–
Hope you will enjoy it ! This contest is still amazing in matters of creativity, and that’s cool.
Rate me. Rate me my friend.
Heist Time now has versions for Windows, Mac and Linux. yaaay!
Play it and rate it here:
http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-32/?action=preview&uid=11344
I present to you Bass.Drop();
you are more than welcome to play and Drop the Bass.
The game is very very simple, I spent most of my time on the music and building a Dynamic Bass Dropping system using FMOD.
Give it a try
http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-32/?action=preview&uid=47252
Aaaand another Ludum Dare is gone.
This time we didn’t have much time to work on the LD, but we’re satisfied anyway with our final result.
We are always learning something new, we improved our skills and we had a good time. These are the most important things about LD for us.
What went good:
A solid game mechanics.
Very nice graphics.
We stick to the theme (woohoooo).
What went bad:
Maybe the game is too easy and we need to add more challenging content.
A problem with the behaviour of the turrets took away lot of time.
Because of the lack of time we decided to cut social relationship on the blog and we didn’t write any update. (We are so sorry about this! please forgive us!)
Here’s the link of our entry if you want to try our game!
In game action
http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-32/?action=preview&uid=34964
I think next time, we would prototype more game play mechanics first.
We had an idea of what we wanted and tried variations of, until it worked – by this point though, the end was in sight and we were full steam ahead to finish everything we could.
This approach meant we had the core mechanic but no complimentary mechanics (mario with the jumping, but nothing interesting to jump on to).
Subtle effects like shaders, particles and sound effects really do make everything pop. They are the difference between a game looking flat and looking polished. I think this is something we will always strive to add to our games.
Coding was split up quite nicely, and meant one of us was always doing something – I would continue this approach in the future. Having specific jobs to do meant we didnt have to worry about other parts of game : ie I worked on the Ai while someone else was writing the base code, while some was building the shaders.
Concept art was handy to help visualize how the controls should feel and the music/atmosphere
Regardless of the things that went well or bad, I think next time we do this more planning at the outset, and sacrificing time to build crap prototypes is for the best.
#1 – Not being familiar with new tools
#2 – Overscoping