What an odissey. For the 24th edition of the Ludum Dare, with the given theme Evolution, I decided to try developing a conversational adventure, wich I thought will suppose less work than other type of genres… ERROR. In a more typical game, with its platforms, monsters and other details, one developed the concept and gameplay, It’s “just” (not meaning easy)  about expanding that world, designing new levels and making the game experiencie wider with elements wich had already been well defined. On last LD, with much less experiencie in game gev, I built Deconstructorium and finished lots of hours before the compo time limit. Moreover, counting that most engines come very well prepared for the platforming genre.

Ages of Irving is a Torture/Interrogating Simulator game with a short story at the background. Believing that the conversational genre won’t steal me so much time, I allowed myself the luxury of designing an art and context rich and well defined. In the end, I not simply failed to finish within 48 hours, but submitted my entry on the very last second of the 72 hours Jam mode, and with just the half of the content I planned.

Creating a deep conversation system, with enough possibilites, actions and reactions from a lot of different characters, generates a huge amount of variables. “This will be just a matter of writting”, I said. I present you the “profile” of just one character so you can make and a idea of the volume of the game. Epic fail on me.

http://pastebin.com/tWLdwNrg

I designed 20 characters. 5 for each phase of Irving’s life, which would have guaranteed a richer gameplay and more liberty as for the ratio of killing/confesing targets (In addition to more context for the story). It was planned that solving 2 of 5 cases you could advance in the game. Now, with just 2 o 3 per level you just need one of them.

The music is also missing this time. I don’t know if I’ll ever get to finish a compo with sound 😛

We plan to work on a more polished version, including all the things that were left over and publish it on clay.io.

You may play this Ludum Dare version here

(On Firefox 14+ tooks a looong time to load, on Chrome runs smoother)

Tags: Conversational, html5, impactjs

We finished on time!! UNBELIEVABLE!! For the first time on our ludum dare history, here we are, publishing a game 1 hours before the deadline. Also, we are very satisfied with the results, the “Minimalism” condition really helped us to get the project on time. Gods Will Be Watching is a minimalistic survival/adventure game with multiple ways of completing it and failing. We hope you enjoy playing

Tags: adventure-game, html5, impactjs, pixel art

This. Is. Amazing.

We didn’t expect this. Gods Will Be Watching was our little minimalistic puzzle game for Ludum Dare 26, and we were happy with it, but, seeing it appearing it all over the internet, and receiving more than 10.000 plays per day was totally unexpected.

We are overwhelmed. Took us several days to recover from the 72 hours effort and being able to face all of the blog posts, tweets, mails, gameplays at youtube… we need to thank so many people!!!!

Here’s a selection of GWBW‘s unbelievable (at least for us) journey on the press:

Gods Will Be Watching Is The Saddest Survival Sim (Rock Paper Shotgun)

A Survival Sim That (Mostly) Takes Place On A Single Screen (Kotaku)

Gods Will Be Watching is a bleak, beautiful free survival sim (Eurogamer.net)

In spanish:

Gods Will Be Watching causa sensación (Hobby Consolas)

La supervivencia minimalista de Gods Will Be Watching (El Píxel Ilustre)

Gods Will Be Watching, un simulador de supervivencia minimalista (Eurogamer.es)

Seeing people playing the game on youtube was something magical:

This mashup video with John Carpenter’s The Thing really moved us :’)

Also the game got featured on Game Jolt!!

Will Gods Be Watching?

We hope so! Since the game got a great acceptance both by press and public, and a lot of people told us they want more, we’d love to expand Sgt Burden’s and his crew universe. A lot of ideas came to us during this week on how to develop the game concept further without losing his essence, and we are thrilled with what we have to offer in the future, so stay tunned!

Twitter: @Deconstructeam !

Tags: Deconstructeam, html5, impactjs, pixelart

Hi Everybody! Do you remember Gods Will Be Watching from last #LD26 “Minimalism”? We got tons of incredible feedback from Ludum Dare and ranked 2nd place in mood and overall! That encouraged us to go for a huge remake and try to take our chances on the commercial scene and become one of those “Success stories”. Since we want to improve our development power and aim to create a really huge polished game for several platforms (Including PC, Mac, Linux and Mobile devices -iOS and Android-), we launched a crowdfunding campaign to get a little push in our way.

We talked in another post here at Ludum Dare about our work on the remake of Gods Will Be Watching. But, along with this crowdfunding campaign we are showing in depth what the game is going to be about. You can check it out here:

http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/gods-will-be-watching/

Ludum Dare gave us a lot of joy and interesting ideas (Ages of Irving, a torture simulator!), thank you, truly, you helped us to grow as game developers.

Gods Will Be Watching on Indiegogo

Tags: adventure-game, Gods Will Be Watching, pixel art, Point'n'click

Ludum Dare 27 game jam concluded and Deconstructeam gave birth to a little dungeon puzzler called Dungen Dogan’s Cursed Crew. In this game you play as Dr. Dogan, who along with his men just raid the tomb of an ancient god whose curse fell upon them: just 10 seconds of life left. Luckily, the weak spot of this god is the black amber, and the dungeon is full of them. In order to escape the temple, you’ll have to combine wisely you team skills and manage accurately the 10 seconds of life of each crew member if you expect to making out alive.

You can play it here.

We are pleased with the result, a humble game with a correct duration. However, this time we had other motives beyond the pleasure of making a game in just a weekend: with the Game Maker: Studio license recently acquired (thanks to the funds of our recent crowdfunding campaign), Ludum Dare presented itself as an excellent opportunity to make an intensive training and finally take the leap from ImpactJS to this new game engine.

I had already made my first steps with the free version of Game Maker, but never made and finished a full project, pretty important matter to me. So, since this game engine is going to be my intimate partner during the development of Gods Will Be Watching, I grabbed the documentation, and stepped into making a game in less than 72 hours. The result stands for itself, a proper game, with several flaws, but a game nonetheless. My verdict: highly satisfied with what Game Maker: Studio has to offer and with how it’s going to improve our production power. Even having to learn along the way, the development speed increased notably in comparison with my beloved ImpactJS, not to metion of its huge variety of supported platforms. With few adjustements, Dungen Dogan’s Cursed Crew was working perfectly on browser and Windows.

I don’t know about you, but personally had many prejudices against Game Maker, particularly through the “Make games without programming skills” slogan. Once I tried his drang’n’drop interface and procured to keep myself far away from it. But knowing that Locomalito‘s games or the same Hotline Miami, were developed with this game engine, I finally decided to give Game Maker a chance, taking as guarantee this games which I worship for their high quality. Great surprise since once left behind the point’n’click programming thing, I took a deeper look at this scripting language GML (Game Maker Language) and discovered its high flexibility and the variety of tools and functions at your service which make your life quite easier regarding the most usual practices when developing a game (mostly about the collision handling).

I’ve never programmed with such agility as in Game Maker, and with no doubt Dungen Dogan’s Cursed Crew would have been much harder to create with ImpactJS. I’m happy knowing that Gods Will Be Watching is going to become a highly polished product and, despite the fatigue that brings a game dev marathon of 72 hours, I’m eager for working even more than before.

Tags: Game Maker, Game Maker Studio, post-mortem, postmortem