After one hour, thirty minutes, I finally came up with an idea.

Since it’s what I’ve been doing for almost a month now, I’ve decided to go with an HTML game. I’ll be using Bootstrap for the CSS and jQuery to make the Javascript. It’ll be a mostly colorless adventure-style game, with the theme being implemented in that there’ll be plenty to see behind the scenes if you look close enough.

It’ll be mostly-text based, but that can be great if done right, and it also cuts down development time a ton. Most of the gameplay will involve entering commands to do stuff, but there’ll also be more incremental-like stuff to unlock, such as upgrades, buildings, etc.

I’m not entirely certain on every aspect of it, but for what I expected of myself, this is a great start – I’ve got an idea, and a terrifyingly unfinished plan. Let’s do this!

…Tomorrow. I’m tired.

Tags: slow, start

So casual.

Getting better. Right-side code is mostly done, though the text-box is still useless.

Back to the drawing board. I’ve no idea what to do with the left side just yet.

Tags: progress, update

Resource management!

Got quite a lot done today. Not too much to do in the game yet, but some of the first few features have been added!

Design should be done, and next up is to do more work on the game code and add some of the other planned features.

Got most of the features done today, as planned! Tomorrow I’ll polish and finish the story, which’ll contain the Behind the Surface part of the game.

Tags: features, jam, progress, update

With little time to spare.

Three hours to go, and all of the important stuff is done.

All that’s left now is to complete the story, which is small, so it should be relatively easy, and just polish if time allows it.

Tags: jam, progress, update

Welp, I barely made it in time, but it’s finished! Fixed a last few 3 bugs, and it’s up.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=36267

“A text-based incremental game where you enter a village and help it prosper. For a while, at least. “

Tags: finished, jam, update

I’d never entered a Game Jam until now, and I”m happy to say it was great! I’ve never had so much fun developing, and never, ever been so productive either! I was slow to start, but towards the end I was rushing due to the time constraint; 529 lines of Javascript, 72 lines of HTML, 151 of CSS for a total of 752 lines of code in 72 hours. May not be too much to some, but for me, that’s a huge record!

Despite only hearing of the jam 9 hours before it began, I got a pretty good start! I got stuck for an idea for a while, just barely managing to get one before Saturday, and prepare a basic template with which to build the game on.

After that, the rest of the next day was spent preparing the first few features. Getting the actual text input done was actually one of the easiest parts, since I was re-using code I’d developed recently in another unreleased game of mine with the same thing. After that, I ran into another design halt as I tried to figure out what I’d do for the left side of the screen, such as whether I’d use buttons or pure text input. Once I got over that (took about an hour alone) I added the first four resources, the day system and the first few commands.

Results of Saturday

Sunday started off pretty good – I had a decent plan going; finish off the game’s features, then work on story and polish tomorrow. As for finishing the features, I didn’t end up managing that, though I did get most of it.

Throughout Sunday, I managed to add village professions to help automatically generate resources and take some of the difficulty off, added a little ‘exhaustion’ mechanic to prevent gather-spamming, add the ‘time’ command and put in the resource stats, all the while attempting to tackle a strange bug thought I fixed that I still don’t understand.

Sunday’s outcome.

Monday was definitely hectic. I spent the better portion of the day implementing upgrades – something I hadn’t originally planned on adding at all – and then another half hour to slowly find out why this suddenly didn’t work, to find variables I forgot to change when I refactored some code earlier.

After finishing upgrades, and spending even more time on adding more info for the professions, I finally got to work on the story and add a win condition with 3 hours left til’ the Jam ended. After some quick designing, I ended up deciding to change the story from it’s original direction. I first had decided the end would involve you finding the villagers to actually be cultists, and to run away after discovering one of the terrible rituals they held, but instead settled on something subtler, although the ending ended up no less sudden.

Three hours remaining.

After rushing to fix a few bugs that were discovered with the ending and add a Favicon, the game was submitted and complete.

I’m actually really surprised with the outcome of the game, and very happy I managed to complete so much of the original idea – and then a little more! Better yet was seeing the first few comments on the game, which were surprisingly positive! I ran into a bump with hosting, but this was easily resolved by putting a mirror up on Google Drive.

Things that went well

• Keeping the idea to something I could handle – This was stretched a little bit, with me barely finished before time was up, but I nonetheless managed to keep the plans to just the right size for me to get everything done and still put out something good.
• The chosen language – I picked HTML5 because I’ve got some pretty good and recent experience with it, having worked on two incremental games before this, so I was able to get to the game quickly and easily.
• The outcome – I am very pleased with what I managed. I never thought I’d be able to pull this off in 72 hours.
• Getting sleep, eating well and going outside – I actually took more walks outside than I usually did, and took regular breaks to get away from it, kept fed and got plenty of sleep each night, which I think played a good part in making the end result what it is.

Things that didn’t go so good

• Planning – I didn’t really get too much of a chance to do it very much, what with having only 9 hours of awareness that the Ludum Dare was even going on – a lot of which was spent wondering if I’d even join.
• The story – What with it being more last-minute, I wasn’t able to flesh it out as much as I would’ve liked.

Suffice to say I’ve had a whale of a time doing this, and am ecstatic I decided to join. I’ll most definitely be here in August to do it all again!

Villager can also be found here, if you’d like to play it:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=36267

Tags: first, jam, Mortem, Post, post-mortem, postmortem

Procrastination got in the way, but it’s done!

Stuff that was changed:

• Saving/loading added. Due to being a short game, I didn’t work on this much, and merely added it in case someone may need it. May be buggy.
• Secret thing added.
• Some of the obvious things you couldn’t examine/assist now can be examined/assisted.
• If you already examined something, this no longer prevents you from examining it again.
• Game lasts a bit longer, but you can now gather faster as well

If you haven’t already, you can play the entry at
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=36267

Or, play the finished version  at http://games.nj-tv.net/villager/postcompo

Not much to say here, other than the fact that I’m proud of the outcome. I’m currently working more on the post-compo version of Villager, as I’ve gotten a ton of useful feedback off it’s release. Thanks to everyone who played the game!

Full ratings:

Tags: first, ratings, villager

Hooray for being able to use the word team in that title! I’m working with two others in this project, which should be a fun experience.

We’ll be using Unity, which is not only awesome already but should help our experience in using it. Blender for modeling and probably BFXR for sound. Not sure how we’ll do music, but if nothing else there’s always abundant-music.com.

Still in the planning stages of a game, though something pretty good is starting to shape up. Going to stream to Twitch and drink many sodas. Best of luck to everyone!

Tags: mld53, start, Team

It’s really bad.

So that was a few hours ago, and since then the A.I. has improved. It’s still not good, but it’s following the player decently.

Outside of that, we’ve gotten an idea in and started working on it for a while, having spent the majority of the day figuring out how player movement will work. Not much is getting done, but it’s nothing to fuss over. If nothing else, valuable experience will be gained working with Unity and each other, and in my case using Git.

Next up is working with raycasts to figure out a good way to accomplish base construction. The plan in the game is for you to be some guy in a field who needs to build a base so he can fly into space to get away from baddies. If time allows, you’ll also have to fight space baddies before getting away by upgrading speed.

Odds are, the full idea won’t finish in 48 hours, but we’ll see what we can do. Also, in addition to my stream my friend is also streaming development occasionally. Find him here if you want to watch!

Tags: artificial, base, friend, intelligence, mld53, stream

So in the process of preventing the enemy from tripping backwards and suffering a gran maul seizure, we’ve apparently given him the ability to glitch through walls. Like I said, I suck at A.I.

In other news, the base construction and terrain are coming along nicely. The basics of building is done, and what’s left is to allow for multiple block types and defenses. On the front of enemies, we’ve got to create spawning, give them health and actually make them dangerous.

In short, we’ve got a long way to go and a lot to do. Even so the knowledge gleamed learning to not suck at Unity will really help in the long run, and will prove valuable come August’s Ludum Dare. Besides that, watching the A.I. I wrote fail miserably was incredibly funny. Hopefully we’ll pull this off, but even if we don’t, fun was had.

Oh, and I am so including an option to ‘un-fix’ all the glitches on the A.I. – there’s no way I’m restricting that fun!

Tags: AI, glitch, mld53, Team

I will avoid using the words “I’m in” for the title!

Anyways, this will be my second Ludum Dare (third if you count Mini Ludum Dare #53)  and I’m going to be going down a different road this time. Instead of simple HTML5 I’m going to be using Unity3D for the engine with C# as my choice of language. For text editing, I’ll just stick with the version of MonoDevelop that comes with Unity.

Finally, I’ll be using BFXR for sounds and Audacity for sound editing, and I’ll simply hope for a miracle when it comes to music.

Good luck, and have fun!

Tags: bfxr, LD30, second, unity

It’s a game where you kill enemies by activating traps instead of shooting guns. You can find it here: http://games.nj-tv.net/envirohazard/

I made this out of inspiration from this post, however I went over six hours since I didn’t want to post anything until I had a way to win – by the end of the originally planned six hours I’d completed everything but the traps, but I’m glad I kept going.

Theme I picked was You Can’t Fight Back, and my best guess is 7 hours 15 minutes total, not including breaks, dinner, sleep, etc. I’d would’ve gotten it done in one day, but I procrastinated.

Tags: game, inspired, warmup

Straight to the point, these are some scripts I wrote in C# for Unity 2D stuff that I’ll be using – feel free to use them any way you want.

TileTextureManager.cs

This script is ment to make creating platformer scenes a bit easier. Assign it to the tile you are using and then give it six sprites for said tile – it will detect nearby tiles and automatically select the appropriate sprite to use, then rotate as needed so that you can place tiles and leave it to the rest.

PlayerMovement.cs

Pretty self-explanatory, this is a simple script to act as a sort of 2D CharacterController for the player. Comes with a debugging option. Requires a trigger collider to detect whether or not the player is on the ground.

EnemyAI.cs

Also rather self-explanatory. Simple script that doubles as very basic A.I. and physics handler for enemies. Physics is nigh-identical to player physics. Also includes debugging option and also needs a trigger collider.

HealthLogic.cs

Decent health script I wrote for whatever needs it. EnemyLogic will need this to deal damage properly to the player properly. Includes logic for invulnerability periods after getting hit. Debugging on this will only display health in the console.

Tags: 2D, AI, health, platformer, player, Scripts

Blocks! Jumping! Jumping blocks!

So thanks to the code I posted, I was able to get done in 2 hours what would’ve probably taken me four. Got basic game mechanics in, most of the art is done and I prepared some SFX with BFXR to top it off.

Superb progress in comparison to the last time I participated, where I only barely managed to get an idea and set up an ultra-basic template for it. Can’t wait for tomorrow!

Tags: 2D, platformer, progress, update

…in all-dirt caves.

Lots of progress today. In short:

1. Player is done, and is no longer a blue block
2. Enemies now spawn regularly from an evil purple portal
3. There is now a background
4. Falling off the level is now impossible
5. 90% of the SFX is completed and integrated

Not terribly much left to do yet. I also don’t even care if I do great – I’d just be happy successfully submitting something decent to the compo!

Tags: blocks, dirt, interstice, portal, progress, update

Still red boxes.

Play it here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=36267

Tags: completed, interstice, progress, update

Woah Ludum Dare great fun videogames stream development tools tools workflow timelapse snowman potato etc etc.

Let’s get to the point.

I’ll probably be joining the compo, and will switch to the jam if I need more time. Tools:

• C# – Language. Obviously superior.
• Unity3D – Game Engine. Due to the awesome folks over at Unity giving away ~1,000 free codes for a month of Pro, this just gets even better.
• MonoDevelop – IDE. Unity’s one weakness. I can’t afford the Visual Studio plugin, so I’m stuck with this.
• Paint.NET – 2D Graphics. Besides the fact that it’s awesome and free, I have the most experience with this.
• BFXR & Freesound – SFX.
• BeepBox – Music.
• Open Broadcasting Software – Streaming [Twitch]

As for a timelapse, I’ll be using Chronolapse, assuming it works. It keeps telling me it doesn’t have write permission, even though I’ve given full permissions to everything for the target folder, and ran Chronolapse as administrator. If anyone has a solution, please comment!

Hoping to do better than last time. Ratings weren’t good, and I procrastinated posting them, so here:

Someone told me my music was good. I still don’t believe they were right.

Learned a ton about Unity platformers though, which led me to fix the super annoying “I’m stuck on this tile wtf” bug and optimize collisions at the same time. It even got me to start a Github project to make Unity assets intended for creating platformer games, which I’ll be using if I create a platformer this time around.

Anyways,  theme dare post wordpress vote potatosalad hope ludum snowman and good luck!

Tags: chronolapse, github, im in, platformer, potato, ratings, results, snowman, timelapse, tools

So, I switched to the Jam. Didn’t feel the game was good enough with what it had, and I hadn’t finished animating in time for the Compo deadline. Now the end result will be way better, way more polished and just generally better.

Got a ton done today – everything I told myself I would and more:

1. Entirety of UI is now completed (Unity 4.6 UI system is the best thing ever)
2. Player redrawn and animated completely
3. Player now has four stats
4. Chests now provide permanent stat bonuses upon being opened
5. Overhauled player & enemy movement – way less buggy
6. Map now has a slight elevation modifier to each line, so it’s less boring
7. Sounds added! Music and more from BeepBox and BFXR.

Also, the Unity 4.6 UI system is freaking amazing. No, I don’t care that I already said that.

I originally wanted the map to have better random generation and wanted to instead add Perlin Noise to it, but that caused weird problems if you turned around, so I had to downgrade it to simply having it being randomized within a specific range. Still less boring, so it’s good enough.

As for the player movement, I finally fixed a jumping bug that had been plaguing me since I added player movement. Occasionally, the game would never realize the player left the ground, and he’d be able to jump infinitely. Adding one variable change upon jumping fixed that, and I also ended up actually using Unity’s ForceMode2D system which made movement way smoother and more responsive.

The main thing I’ve gotta address for tomorrow is enemy difficulty scaling. As it stands, you can get infinitely powerful in every stat except speed, so if you played right you’d become essentially immortal. I plan to make the enemies rise in difficulty with each successive spawning of them, and plan to make killing them reward you with experience, which will provide a less frequent but more powerful permanent bonus similar to what opening chests does now. This will add incentive to killing enemies: Kill them and grow stronger; If you don’t, they’ll get stronger faster than you. Other than this, all that’s left is general polish.

Anyways, Unity 4.6 has a great UI system, and good luck!

Tags: 2d unity, day 3, day three, jam, platformer, progress, unity, update