Really excited to be joining the Jam with my team. I’ll be doing all the art/animation and my teammates from wefiends who I normally work with will be taking care of all the other good stuff 
Language: HTML5
Framework: Cocos2dx
Art: Flash, Photoshop, Illustrator
Music/Sound Effects: Reason, Audacity
Can’t wait to get the theme and get started. I haven’t tried to make a game this quickly in like 7 years, it’s gonna be interesting. 😀
Yay, progress. Spent 4-5 hours trying to figure out what our main character was going to look like, not exactly the best time spent. He ended up looking something like this:
We’re starting out with an arena type slash em up game, where the attributes of your character change every 10 seconds. So you could be in the middle of a fight against an undead skeleman and with a timer ticking down notifying “You sword will soon be a fish”, or “Enemies will be stronger.” Random rule changes that mix up the gameplay, I think it could be fun.
Hopefully it’ll be modular enough so that once we have an engine going we can just keep adding for a while and end up with somewhat of a full game.
So far our title for the game is Curse of the… something idk.
Worked out the beginning of a good concept I think. Starting to work on some character sketches. Super duper excited! I’ll post more details about our idea once we work it out some more!
More artwork done. Skelemans and some other enemies are done, as well as attacking and all the animations involved in that. Our programmer is still on basic engine stuff (getting the dude on screen working with physics) and hopefully once that’s out of the way it’ll pick up speed.
I’ve been seeing a lot of amazing stuff on here. I can’t wait to play a lot of these games.
*Pinch Pinch*
Anyway, it’s 4am here and I’m too tired to think anymore, gonna rest up and keep going tomorrow.
So… we didn’t finish. But that’s only slightly disappointing. Personally, I learned a lot. Specially how easily scope creeps up. Our original idea was even bigger than the one we attempted. Imagine that.
Idea(Kevin): We spent the first 4-5 hours of jam trying to come up with a good idea. My girlfriend, Brooke, helped concept stuff and do some of the visual HUD/Menu elements. We really didn’t want to trivialize the 10 second theme. So I didn’t want to make a mini-game game, or anything that added the 10 second element to an existing game. We ended up deciding that every 10 seconds there should be a change to the rules of how you play the game, and I thought a sidescrolling brawler with weapon/character changing and enemies would be a fun way of incorporating that.
In the end I feel like it’s still just a tacked on mechanic, but what led to the idea were better ideas that were unfeasible for the amount of time.
Art (Kevin): I didn’t have very much difficulty with the character art/animation, that is, once I finally figured out what the character was going to be. That did take a while. I knew it had to be someone adventurous. I drew buff dudes, and that was sorta neat. I’m very comfortable with Flash, so it was a pretty standard work experience. In the end it all sort of came down to Nick, our programmer, saying, “Just make it a pirate.” After that I just drew a little pirate guy and that was that.
The background was the most experimental part for me. I don’t usually work in photoshop for background stuff, and I’m not the best painter by any stretch of the imagination. Took a lot of noodling and guesswork. I had to build it for parallax scrolling (which didn’t end up in the game) and that made it much more difficult. Had to make sure to keep all my layers separate, and it was just a jarring change to my usual workflow that I sort of enjoyed.
Music (Steph as told by Kevin): Steph used reason to make all the music. She made 2 songs, one which she decided wasn’t good enough. She did a really fantastic job and ended up having the best part of the game I think, which is almost always the case anyway. I give her huge props for staying up until 4am only to go to her job at like 6-7am with like an hour of sleep. The entirety of the music was done in I think one day, not including the first tune she scrapped.
Programming (Nick): So my goal was to make an HTML5 platformer that was entirely physics driven, without resorting to moving around static bodies and using Box2d for collisions only. This turned out to be our biggest pitfall. Unfortunately the JS ports of both Box2d and Chipmunk are still relatively new and untested. I switched over from Box2dWeb to Chipmunk.js late Saturday, after battling with it all day. Box2dWeb is a direct (automatic?) port of Box2dFlash, and many of the problems that crop up there show up in the port.
Things went much faster with Chipmunk.js, but it’s not perfect. For example, setting a velocity limit on a body in Chipmunk.js will error out. Oops, guess nobody has ever used that feature before.
Thankfully, both Box2DWeb and Chipmunk.js are open source and I’ll be able to contribute the fixes I made. I also ported over a parser for Physics Editor (codeandweb.com) and I’ll throw it up on GitHub in case anybody needs it in the future.
Cocos2d-x-html5 turned out to be fantastic, and the promise of easy porting is a reality. I was able to compile and run my JS untouched in an Xcode project targeting OS X.
I’m really grateful for all the work that’s been put into these libraries. Without them, I’m not sure the awesomeness we’re seeing this weekend would be possible.
Libraries: cocos2d-x-html5, chipmunk.js
Tools: Brackets, Sublime Text 2, TexturePacker, PhysicsEditor, Chrome + Dev Tools, Tern.js, and Git
Anyway, heres where the game ended up. It’s very unfinished, and lacks the 10 second mechanic or any sort of polish. It was however a very good learning experience.
And heres what we wanted to do.
I almost forgot! HUGE applause for everyone that finished their game on time. It really is a feat, and anyone who participated should be really proud of themselves. It was an awesome first time for us, and I’m already excited for the next one. Ludum Dare rocks.
We finally decided on an unconventional weapon: music! Our working title is “Dischord”.
This will be wefiends’ 2nd attempt at Ludum Dare Jam. Good luck to everyone!
Tools that we’ll be using:
We will be streaming on Twitch at twitch.com/wefiends and live tweeting @wefiends.
Tags: 2D, game, jam, Ludum Dare
6 Hours in and we got a box to move around! Also got a concept we’re pretty happy with, and a few early art assets.
Hello fellow ludumites,
5 hours or so to go until the ball drops on LD32, thought I’d write something up as a post mortem for the game we made. I think normally I’d of written this up a day or two after we finished the game but this time was kind of different. A lot of post-mortem’s focus on what mistakes we made, our failures and short-comings, but (and i’m hesitant to say this) the process of creating the game this time was pretty smooth. You could say maybe we didn’t push ourselves hard enough, but I’d say that’s probably always true.
The game has it’s flaws, and small design choices made the game a little worse than it could have been. That’s not really the point of LD for me though. I’d never expect to have a product i’m happy with after 3 days, hell most of the time I’m not happy after years of production. The point is we made something, and anyone that can say they even attempted that should be happy with themselves.
I’m mostly proud of how much we’ve grown as a team. To try and grow as an individual; to become better at drawing, or coding, or playing music is something most of us do out of instinct. Growing as a team, learning to communicate and accommodate for one another isn’t as obvious, but it’s just as important and achievable. I think we’ve taken a step forward in that regard, still far from perfect.
Our biggest weakness now is reaching out to the public. We dipped our toes by playing LD submissions on Twitch, it was a lot of fun. I think LD could be a really good way to practice marketing in the future. To try and sell a 3 day game, get it “let’s played” and maybe written about, it’d be an interesting part of the dare.
With that, i’m looking forward to the next one.
Seriously, congrats to everyone that worked on a game, it’s always amazing to see how many people make so many good games. Can’t wait to play them once the jam is over.
We’ve made a lot of progress!
Lots done. Walking around, path finding, obstacles, oh and a controls tutorial! 😀
Hey ya’ll, hope you all slept like babies after all that hard work.
First off, check out our LD Entry Mmmonster! Make sure to read the Readme file if you’re on Windows 7, and don’t forget to rate and leave a comment 😀
Also, we’re gonna stream on Twitch, so don’t be a stranger.
I’ll keep it short since we still don’t have all our thoughts together. We managed to get a game done, and it ended up… pretty alright!
Congrats to everyone out there who managed to make a game. This LD was particularly tough for us, again, still not sure why.
Anyway, check out our game, Limber, and dance your lovely hearts away.
Play Limber Here!
