Time's counting down - are you ready? I think I am... but the excitement nerves are still running rampant. Here's a clean (unbranded) version of my team's wallpaper for the jam, in case anyone needs one!

After our first five hours, my team and I have a fairly solid idea of what we're making. The issue is we've had was how to make what we're making. lol

We've opted for a very simple, straightforward interpretation of the theme, and a simple FPS system. It was all going well until some of our ragdoll models... well, let's just say they had a few issues.

First, they melted instead of ragdolling, giving the models a jello-like appearance.

Later they got together and 'danced.'

Suffice it to say, dancing/spasming baddies was not in the design doc.

Eventually though, they fell in line.

Now to rest for an early start tomorrow!

Our game has made some progress, I'd say. We went from this last night:

... to this today:

Building models, better lighting, a new custom skybox, a proper weapon model, the bullets no longer resemble orange tennis balls, and five levels of shoot-em-up action.

It took a few days, but our entry finally has a title!

We still need all of the audio, but the gameplay mechanics, UI, 3D models/textures, animations, etc are pretty much done. We might retool a level or two, but we're well on our way to completing our entry.

We managed to finish early for once, and our entry, Zombody's Business, has been submitted! It's a low poly FPS about collecting zombie bodies and taking them to the Zombody Shoppe to cash them in.

Check it out for yourself! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/58/zombodys-business

Day 1:

Work began, as it often does for us, with capsule people.

I often use these capsule people as placeholders during development as stand-ins until proper models can be made. In this case, they fulfilled their role as I implemented the first person controls. It'd been awhile since I'd made FPS controls from scratch so it took a little while, but eventually we nailed it.

The player and zombies were simple low-poly models to save time. I'm always wary of rigging an armature, but thankfully there was no issue this time - it worked as intended the first time. I don't remember why or when ragdoll physics became a mandatory feature in our game, but at some point it did, so I had to figure out how that system worked. This results in a range of goofs and gaffes, from characters melting to them going into spastic fits.

We eventually ironed out that the character animation system needed disabled along with the main capsule collider to prevent the model from going haywire. We also had to worry about the bodies trapping the player, so it was decided that the player wouldn't collide with the enemy models after they died, making body collection easier and preventing the player from getting stuck. At this point I began modeling the buildings for our city, and we shortly ran into a problem.

After making our hospital, I thought I might have spelled the word "HOSPITAL" wrong on the building, but blew it off as me being self-conscious. However, when @floata3 pointed out the same thing, it became an issue. We spent a good while trying to convince ourselves it was correct, even Googling it multiple times to confirm, but it never did look right. It was at that point we decided we were tired and needed to break for the evening.

Day 2:

Reconvening in the morning, work began on making the city zones that would comprise the individual levels. Rather than make them in Unity, I opted to build the levels completely in Blender and import them each as a single monolithic mesh.

Day 2 was almost exclusively level creation because each map took a good while to build and test. I did have to problem solve the difficulty level mechanism, since we'd decided to have the Easy difficulty only play levels 1 and 2, while Normal did levels 1 to 4, and Hard took the player to 1 through 6. My solution was tied into how I tracked the difficulty. The difficulty was logged as an integer, 0 for easy, 1 for normal and 2 for hard, so I created a list of next scenes for the game to go to after completing a level, and had it select the one corresponding to the difficulty level (i.e. Easy selected option 0 from the list, Normal selected option 1, etc.). A simple, somewhat elegant solution to a fairly simple problem.

Day 3:

The third and final day was audio day. I needed to record voices for the zombies and source a gunfire sound effect. I tried multiple ways to create a gunfire sound, but the best I could create sounded like a cap gun rather than a proper pistol, so I broke down and went to Freesound.org for a gun sound effect. @floata3 came through with the music, and with that, we were largely done. The final detail was a pair of volume sliders on the title screen, to accommodate individual players' preferences.

With that, Zombody's Business was complete, and its fate is now in all of your hands. If you haven't given it a shot, now would be as good a time as any!

I’ve felt contemplative lately and wanted to write a short-ish post about my team’s Ludum Dare history. Ludum Dare 58 was our 17th, dating back to LD 30. We started out creating our games in Stencyl, which at the time I jokingly called “programming with LEGOs”. The downside today is that our first four entries (Melody’s Long Ladder Home, Icy’s Trivial Travails, Dial M for Monster and Driven Insane) were made exclusively for Flash and aren’t publicly playable anymore.

We transitioned to Unity for Box ‘n Bash in Ludum Dare 34, taking that jam as an opportunity to learn how to make a game in Unity. Yes, our LD entry that year was our first attempt at Unity. Really, cramming for the jam and then turning out something at the end in an engine we’d never used before was super satisfying, and highly recommended. There’s nothing to lose by not completing your project on time, and the impetus of a surprise theme and the tight deadline can be invigorating.

I grew up watching Iron Chef, Junkyard Wars and the like, so I love the on-the-fly improv that comes from a short deadline and a surprise theme. Take what you know, use what you have, manage the clock, and create something special. The short timeframe stops projects from spiraling out of control and keeps you focused until the end.

One of the things we’ve never successfully done for a game jam is a multiplayer game. We’ve had some that started with multiplayer in the design doc (Needle in a Neighborhood comes to mind), but it always gets cut.

Our most common genre is the side-scrolling platformer, of which we’ve in five of our 17 jams. The next most common with three are FPS and what I’d call ‘falling games,’ where you control an object falling from the top of the screen and guiding it to safety. The fact that we’ve done that in over 17% of our jam entries (stacking crates in Box ‘n Bash, guiding a bell pepper into an oven in Get Baked, and helping a squirrel catch nuts in Grab Your Nutz) is a little weird, given that it’s not that common a theme.

Speaking of Grab Your Nutz, it just got a high-res release on Android this month. New graphics, but the same basic gameplay. Here’s the original from 2020, compared to the new version from this year:

If you’re interested, you can download it for free on Google Play.