So, I’ve been busy those past ludum days, working on some bugs and feedback from friends of mine who played the game for us.
Anyway, its Post-Mortem time(no -mortem, cause we are going to work on the game until we actually launch it!) of our Jam entry: Heroes of Okarine!

Party

We are together a new game development/web design/illustration/mobile app company named Imaginer Studios. Born here in Brazil, and looking foward to ingress into the indie game dev industry. We are 5 partners on the company, but only 4 participate on this LD.

• Paulo was our illustrator and artist. He made the Hercules, the zombies, the Okarine and the platforms on the game. The background we got from a free sprite website cause we didn’t had much time to make something good as we though.
• Lucas Guilherme was the image curator and made part on the Game Design with us. He helped by being harsh with us and pushing us more (more like our bard) and by making some image treatment.
• Tiago Aguiar was the leader Game Designer. Me and him though about the game core concept, history and level design (even it wasn’t a good one xD)
• Me, Lucas Arruda, was the Game Developer. My job was simple: code all the game by myself.

Tools

• Game Maker: Studio 1.4
• Photoshop
• Pyxel Edit and GM:S Sprite editor

What went well

• The effort from all the partners was a huge thing for the development. It was our first time making a game (and for me, the first time I’ve actually finish one on a playable state), and we all had several difficulties, but we all made a lot of effort to submit the game as we imagined as near as possible.
• Me, Lucas and Tiago live near each other, and we stayed all in on the Tiago’s house, all the day, for making this project come alive (the reason is in the “What didn’t go well” section).
•  Tiago’s Mother made a lot of food for us \o/

What didn’t go well

• Lucas and Me, on the morning of Sunday, lost the Internet connection in our houses (cuz the universe wanted to make a trial for us, I think). So we needed to run to Tiago’s house to the game be possible to exist.
• Multiplayer Bugs. On the LD version that we were trying to finish with Multiplayer, I tried my best to implement it, but whenever I created a new player object on the room, my objects inside that room just glitched in an ugly way (I’ll try to put a screenshot on my twitter ).
• No music. This was a little sad for all of us, but on a group of 4 who was actively developing the game, no one knew how to make some good sound effects and music for the game.
• Lack of other heroes and depth. The game itself is a simple game. We imagined it with a lot more stuff in it, and the game concept itself has a really good theme to work on. But we had little time to show you all the might of what we actually tried to make.
• We only have a Windows version, because we use the GM:S Standard. Thats a huge drawback, unfortunately.

Well, that concludes the “post-mortem” of our game. I would like to announce that we are going to continue and develop the game after LD.

If you didn’t test and rated the game, please, do it :3 (click on the game logo on top of the post). Every kind of feedback is welcomed, so be free to comment ^^.

WE ARE WAITING FOR YOU!

YOU ARE WELCOME!

Play DISCOCUBE (All platforms)

This is my LD 37 entry. It’s a puzzle game, not too easy,  not too hard.

The game consists of 5 areas in total, in each one, ONE ROOM has the solution.

If you have time, please try it out, you won’t regret it!

Link to the entry: Click here

I’ve done several ludum dare compos now. I see that there are a large number of people that choose niche platforms or add some component to limit those that can play or rate.

Multiplayer – The majority of players that I can see are solo entry and are just going to be playing solo. I know personally if I come across a multiplayer entry I tend to skip them since I don’t plan to find someone else to play with, especially local multiplayer. I feel that making a multiplayer only game limits the number of people legitimately rating your game.

VR – The barrier to VR is a minimum of $600 at this time not counting the cost of PC upgrades. I have a VR kit and I am still skipping over these because of the setup.

The same goes for needing to install software other than the game in order to play the game as well as being unable to play because you lack said platform or software.

I just think that for a compo where there is an obligation to play other’s games it should be done in a medium that is best for the average participant.

Introducing “Looking For Heals” (an MMO Raid Sim). Have fun trying to heal a band of incompetent dwarven warriors as a lone priest, destined for a party wipe!

Tags: 2D, boss, Demon, dungeon, dwarf, jam, mmo, one room, Priest, Raid, sim

After some heavy testing and code reviewing I finally fixed bug in my game where after some time players axe was not working.

So I uploaded new version of the game – check it out 
Also I tweaked some numbers to allow all players (that are skilled enough) to finish the game and open all items.

As always, Jam builds are available on itch.io too.

Here is the soundtrack I created for Flight Attend-A-Thon.

If you like it, be sure to check out the game here!

I finally managed to fix some issues in my Jam entry Henry Snackleworth’s Weird Day

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-37/?action=preview&uid=83463

v1.1 Release Notes:
– fixed a lot of hitbox issues (most players had trouble with those)
– fixed fridge jump path so the player is not hit immediately when it jumps
– extended player range a little
– some HP balancing
– fixed attacks sometimes not being triggered correctly (especially the painting’s acid attack)
– moved cursor away from objects in the bedroom so a level is not immediately triggered after losing a fight

The fixes are most important for the boss shown above, but the other two bosses still benefit from the changes.

This Ludum Dare was super difficult for me. I had an idea for a game which I knew I couldn’t finish on time, but I started creating the graphics anyway.

So on Sunday morning I had some assets ready and 0 lines of code. Then I took a shower and came up with completely new and much simpler idea. After few hours I realized, that it wasn’t as simple as I thought it is. Tons of small details needed to be fixed and tweaked. I managed to send the game to Compo, but I wasn’t very happy with the controls.

So on Monday I changed them, tweaked some effects a little bit and switched from Compo to Jam. And here is the final result. Hope you will enjoy it.

PLAY IT HERE

Hey everyone, now that the submissions are in, I thought I’d upload Super Battle Cycle’s timelapse video. Take a look (it’s a short video), and if you want to play the entry, go ahead and do so please 😀

I hope you find it interesting.

Play Here (Web)

Thanks!

Tags: compo timelapse, timelapse

I had a lot of fun creating the startscreen for my game this time.

Overall I’ve been having a lot of fun this past weekend, I can’t wait for the next edition. You can give my game a try over there. See you next time!

Yo, who knows what’s what when it comes to Unity Physics 2D? Occasionally when the swords in our game collide, it breaks the hinge joints holding the sword to the arm…. what’s the deal with this?  Any tips and tricks with Physics 2D would be super appreciate.  Wanna squash this bug for good!

Meanwhile…. Check out Shadow Fencer Theatre!

Umbra Exitus now is embedded on it’s page and you can plug and play! Or… click and play, I don’t know.

Umbra Exitus is a game about using light in the darkness. With light you can open your path, find traps, survive and find the exit. Your objective is to escape the room. And you must explore the darkness to kill robots and use their lights to find the exit.

If you have the time, we appreciate if you play, you won’t regret 😀

Thank you for playing and enjoy!

If you happened to have played before and had stopped Trump but hadn’t changed the timeline:
You did it all wrong and you now must play again.
Basically fake news – oops 😉
Now, you could argue it wasn’t your fault and that there was a bug in the game, fine – but you should have known it better, right?
Now stop complaining, go play it again and this time stop Trump for real!

(it’s fixed now – sorry for the inconvenience)

Hey fellow gamedevs,

We are a team of german students that participated the fifth time now. We name ourselfs “Banana4Life” and have developed the game “Legendary Legionnaire 3 – Food Massacre“. It was really fun to develop a successor to our last two ludum dare entries that was totally different in terms of gameplay, but takes place in the same universe, where a legionnaire tries to kill the alien overlords.

You can rate and play our game here: Legendary Legionnaire 3 – Food Massacre

You can find our last two games for the full experience here:

• Legendary Legionnaire Winter Massacre
• Legendary Legionnaire Massacre 2 – The Empire Strikes Back

But now lets get to the post-mortem. Some circumstances led to us being 7 people this ludum dare. Two up from the five last time. Surprisingly this did not lead to much more confusion and some work that would always be done in the last hour (like UIs) were worked on earlier. All in all the many people were a good thing and the single person could concentrate better on their task.

After our first steps with Unity and C# last time we used it this time too, however this time we really encountered problems with it. After we did version control with git for some hours in the first day, we switched to Unity collaboration which did all the merging that had to be done for each pull, but also led to loss of data especially in the scene. We generated the whole map in a script, however the UI constantly lost parameter assignments after pulling from Unity Collab. This was really annoying and we want to have a solution for this problem the next ludum dare. Maybe we will even try something new in regards to the engine next time.

As we always try to make the ludum dare more interesting by trying out new stuff, we got our hand dirty with 3D this time. Nobody in the team has created 3D models or code for a 3D game before so we sticked with voxel models as you see it in the picture up top. This proved to be a good decision, because I (Jonas) as the artist for the last game always did pixel art before and could transfer my skills to the third dimension. The game logic as we did a restaurant management game with a top down perspective was two dimensional.

For the 3D modelling we used MagicaVoxel which is a great tool for voxel art and from the twitter of the creator will probably be perfect after the next update. Before the jam our idea was to rig the models and create the animations ourself, but Niko did decide to use the auto-rigger Adobe’s Mixamo. The animations look great even on the voxel model. This leads into the biggest pain point of this ludum dare. We rewrote our movement code three times and did not even work in the end. In the first iteration, the logic was separated from the animations, but the animations did not really work for some reason. The second iteration made heavy use of the animation state machine, however we found that the animation state machine did not really work as expected. Triggers did not trigger at the right time and somehow we could not retrieve if the state machine was currently in a transition. The third time we used the root motion of the animations, which were however for the running animation not straight and introduced their own set of problems. Nobody was satisfied with the movement in the end, however we just focused on the gameplay on the last day and submitted a game which was good.

(The particle system of Unity works great.)

A small degradation to last time was that the same setup for the streaming did not work and we completely dropped streaming for the first and last day, whereas we streamed all three days with a cool setup last time.

What went right?

• We expanded the story of our legionnaire.
• The game is playable and the idea still seems fun.
• We were really productive and learned a lot.
• Due to the many people in the team I could focus on graphics entirely, which lead to cool models and particle effects.
• We implemented the hardest parts first (for example pathfinding) and after that connected all lose ends to a cool game.
• Almost all planed features went into the final release.
• We slept a reasonable amount of time.

As you see the most important parts went right and I think we did a pretty good job developing the game, however a few crucial things went wrong.

What went wrong?

• We thought the theme wasn’t really that great. People please don’t vote these restrictive and uncreative themes.
• The movement code and animations is where everything went wrong. It was the core feature and did not work until the very end where it was the least shitty. This also delayed all the features of the game to the last day.
• Version control

What we want to do better?

• Have a better theme. 😛
• Learn how to write movement code.
• Solve the version control problem.

I hoped you liked my writeup and visit our website for more of our games. Greetings,

Jonas
Team Banana4Life

P.S.: Play and rate our game please.

Tags: gamedev, LD37, ldjam, Ludumdare

I made a short trailer for my game. This may be the best video I’ve ever made.

Play our game here!

just testing

I hope everyone had a good Ludum Dare! It looks like we made quite a few games this past weekend I enjoyed myself, and I thought I would make a reflection post on my entry, “Emily”.

Now, while I like my own entry and think I did good work over the weekend, I am going to probably rake my entry over the coals. This is with the intention of improving on the design and looking to the future. Play it over here if you want to try it out before reading on.

Emily is a narrative game whose premise is that you are moving into a room in an apartment and the previous tenant’s belongings are still there. The game centers around examining the environment to get an idea of what went on with the last tenant, as well as interacting with her friends via phone to find out . So it is narrative-driven game with a bunch of clutter and phone interfaces that get you insight into the character of Emily.

Except that it really isn’t. Emily is what you get when you make a narrative-driven game without a clear idea of what the narrative is going to be. The game has a good premise, but it loses its way with that premise because I didn’t know what had happened to Emily until I wrote that final dialogue. Even then, when I wrote that dialogue, I needed something to quickly cap off the story so I could make the game end and submit it for the compo. I’d had two other characters planned, but by planned, I really mean that I had started out by selecting four names of characters to interact with, but had no idea how they were going to interact.

The characters are all pretty utilitarian. They exist to give the player a tiny bit of information and advance the game. It’s entirely terribly written, and all on the fly. I recognize this, and I chastise myself for this. I’m a narrative designer. The narrative is what I live for. Yet my entry has such a tacked on narrative that it’s embarrassing. I mean, Emily doesn’t even have any real character. She’s an environmental science grad student who is a bit flaky with her job assisting professors in classes.

Emily is a shell without a narrative. It’s a good shell, though. It’s one I want to work with. I had a lot of good ideas during the compo, many of which needed to be pushed aside. I spent a bunch of time coming up with an idea for the theme (ironically needing to take my own advice), and I started off working on making art. I didn’t even get around to making any code until the middle of Saturday. Much of the time was making sure I could model the things I wanted, and that the UI would work. I don’t spend a lot of time with Blender, so I wanted to be certain that it wouldn’t be a bottleneck. Perhaps it was, but I’m happy with what little I produced. I really wish there was more stuff to interact with, though.

Here are some of the things I wanted, but didn’t have time to even consider. It would be nice to have books that are actual books with pages of text. This would add a wealth of depth to Emily’s character. I also thought of the idea of moving furniture around the room. This would add a gameplay mechanic for what your player is initially starting out doing. The idea would be, then, that many of the clues to what’s going on be hidden behind or under things, including the initial clue of Emily’s school notes, which was cheated by having it instead visible just barely behind the dresser. Something else that is related to this is the ability to pick up and examine objects. This starts getting into areas of modelling that I’m a bit sketchy on. I admit that texturing is a bit of a weak point for me. I haven’t quite figured it out. Hence, everything is relatively flat shaded in this game. Coupled with being able to pick things up is the ability to put things down.

Finally, the most complicated thing I thought of was including Delilah. Delilah is a cat, and making a cat in the compo was right out. Not only is it a complicated model with a lot of issues for animation, but if I wanted Delilah to move around the room, I’d need a kind of cat AI, and I wasn’t touching that in just 48 hours.

Again, I think that Emily is a good proof of concept for me, and I can work with it. I need to figure out a real story to tell, not just the tacked on one that I did for the compo. Something with a bit more mystery and a better payoff. I don’t think I want Emily to need “rescuing” but rather more of a situation where the player gains entry into some secret goings-on. I’d like it if there could be some tiny hints to it in the newspaper, but that might be difficult with a classifieds section. I would like for the player to be able to call the other people in the paper, even still. Speaking of calling, I’d like to make the phone more like a phone and give it a contacts section, and perhaps some other apps to make it more useful. Maybe a camera mode, even. Another thing I was going to add was a separate dialogue interface. I had started on this in the wee hours of Sunday, and after a headache decided to forego it and use the message box. A specialized UI that includes dialogue choices would be nice.

If there’s anything else you think is missing, feel free to say. I accept any criticism as it comes. I enjoyed myself, certainly, and I hope you all did as well. Hope the judging goes smoothly for everyone. We all did a great job, regardless 😀

Tags: compo, criticism, postmortem, reflection

This is my 3rd LD, and I decided to make a board game this time, because I was busier. The end result isn’t exactly a “board” game, but I’m very happy with it.

Check it out here!

Have u thought of being a weapon shop owner while zombies are everywhere, you still have customers??

Well, you better check this game out and experience! HEE HEE
Shoot zombies AND SELL GUNS! (WHAAAT?)

Check the game out here!