Greetings!
This month’s LD will be my first! I look forward to seeing what I can accomplish. I’m fairly certain I’ll be doing the Dare with the following toolkit:
Here’s to hoping for a good and exciting LD!
2xH Studios is preparing for this round of the Ludum Dare! We’ve been pumped all week for this moment!
Software Engineer’s Toolkit
– Visual Studio 2010 – VB.NET – XNA Framework
– GIMP (Minor image editing and temporary assets)
– Tiled (Level Creation)
Graphic Designer’s Toolkit
– Photoshop
– Tiled (Level Creation)
Sound Engineer’s Toolkit
– Fruity Loops 6
We look forward to seeing what everyone does! Those competing in the Dare, we wish you the best of luck! To those competing in the Jam…well, we also wish you luck!
We’ve completed Character Select! Next up is combat!
10 seconds to decide your action. Enemies are obviously quicker, but your decision will determine if you fall or if you emerge victorious.
Being my first LD, I didn’t know what to expect. Part of me predicted a sit-down-and-crunch-code session to go on throughout the weekend. After my first 6 hours, breaks had to be in order. Between copious amounts of testing during development and a wandering attention span, I’m proud to say that I did make it.
Without support from our artist (Matt), sound engineer (Ace), #Ludumdare for getting me past that KeyboardState hump, and my wife…we probably wouldn’t have a game.
This isn’t just 2xH Studios’ first release, it’s actually my first personal full release. In a mountain of unfinished projects and bad concepts, I suppose a theme and a deadline were just what I needed to get something done.
I’m proud of our team. I’m proud of our work. Yeah, it’s clunky…but its coded from the ground up. It’s a mess, but its our mess.
Here’s to many future Ludum Dares.
-Bryan
After our first entry, our team has undergone some changes (new team members, dedicated projects, things like that). We’ve transitioned from XNA to Unity and are looking forward to collaborating and tackling the challenge of this round’s theme! We will be streaming development just like last time and look forward to talking to viewers!
-Bryan
Greetings fellow darers (Is that a word???)! Bryan here. I’ll be competing in the 31st Dare’s 48 hour compo this weekend solo, representing 2xH Studios! The hype is real!!
Tools
– Visual Studio 2013 Ultimate
– Unity Pro (Jam License – Thanks, Unity and Ludum Dare!)
– GIMP
– Realtimeboard
– Otomata & Audacity
Budget
Pizza: $40
Sodas/Coffee/Water: $30
“Liquid Encouragement”: $20
Weekend of Game Jamming: $Priceless
Good luck to those who are creating, and a hearty “Have Fun!” to those only judging!
P.S. Down with ☃!
I’ve been working really hard over the past few hours and have made SUBSTANTIAL progress! Feel free to tune into my Live Stream while I work on this throughout the day. My project is titled StarFighter, where you must destroy the enemy spawners before their created army takes YOU out!
Despite losing a few hours to sleeping in accidentally, I’m more than making up for it!
After a VERY long night and loaded morning, the final touches have been put on StarFighter! There’s a lot of neat quirks and even a bug-turned-feature, but I’m proud of what I’ve done so far. I’ve overcome several challenges and learned an incredible amount. I very much look forward to submission tonight at 9pm (EST) tonight!
And now, back to a bit more polishing.
Quercus Games is in! We’re throwing all our effort into LD32. After the last LD, we decided to do a team effort this time around.
This time, we increased the pizza budget.
Quercus Games is going to be competing as a team for our 5th Ludum Dare! We’ve got 1 artist, two programmers, and our write ready to rock! Here’s a handy Kadgar link for all of the participants on our team who will be streaming.
Good luck everyone competing in the compo and in the Jam!
Hello fellow devs! We've been working hard on our game, Type Fighter: Turbo - a hybrid Typing Tutor+Fighting game. My good friend and Ludum Dare vet, @LurkinMcClerkin, is flexing his artistic muscle and I've been tasked with the engineering side of things. While the art you see is mostly placeholder, we've managed to get a pretty substantial library of 300+ words and a few of our literary master friends are contributing to challenge levels! I look forward to keeping this momentum going!
We've gotten a lot done so far! Expanding our word library by another 100 words, implementing some SERIOUSLY SLICK art assets from @LurkinMcClerkin, and implementing the typing system. We're getting ever-closer to a fully playable state!
We've tweaked a lot! 4-5 hours of bug fixes, several blisters from testing and coding, and 3 pizzas later, we're getting extremely close to a finished game! SFX, Visual effects, music, and the second boss are all that remains! Additionally, thanks to a few friends, we have tested Mac OS and Linux builds!
Keep on jamming!
What a whirlwind weekend. Thank you all so much for your support during this event. Here's some fun fact for data nerds like me:
If you haven't already, please give our title a shot. We will be doing our best to rate all of the games by developers who take the time to rate our title and appreciate your time in advance.
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/type-fighter-turbo
Thank you Ludum Dare staff, community, and content creators. You make this event worth every second.
While thinking about ways to further improve our Jam entry, Type Fighter Turbo, I went ahead and ported it to Xbox One. Thankfully, XB1 natively supports keyboards, so this was a breeze!
Full post-mortem can be found here to save space. Dev screenshots included!
This'll be my last post regarding Type Fighter: Turbo. If you'd like to keep up to date with it, please feel free to give me a follow on Twitter.. Josh and I sincerely appreciate all the feedback on our entry. We've got it all collected and are going to continue working on this beyond the Ludum Dare. If you haven't already, please give our title a play and rate! We appreciate your time and will be returning the favor.
Hello there! Wanted to toss together a nice post-mortem now that my cooldown period from the Jam is over. This theme was a pretty open book!
On our first session right after the theme was announced, we got straight to work. My friend, Lurkin, immediately came up with the idea for a monster-support game. Though, it originally began as a point-and-click title.
(Screenshot snagged from Lurkin's stream at https://www.twitch.tv/lurkinmcclerkin)
We settled on kind of a multidirectional action-like game after some further discussion and I got to work with prototyping as some starting assets were whipped up. The first challenge was conveying to the player the status of the then-unnamed client. In an off-hand comment, Lurkin suggested a computer monitor.
Nimmems whipped up an absolute bop of a song which was later freshened up and implemented. I think it went fairly far in setting the overall tone for what the game would eventually become!
After that, we determined that to "keep it alive," the best way to accomplish that is by providing needs. I prototyped a few "resource nodes" which could be picked up and deposited at the client's feet, and a bar increased. At this point the nodes meanings were undetermined, aside from the food bucket-and-dispense mechanic (which was always determined to be that sweet, sweet Gormel chili)
We requested our friend Nowda put together some psuedo-antagonizing voice lines for the game which ended up going REALLY far in terms of subtly encouraging the player. It also is meant to drive home and confirm for the players assumptions as to what exactly they're supposed to do in the game to keep Mr. X alive. Turns out he had a voice filter that ended up being PERFECT for the cause, and by Build 4 things were beginning to really take shape.
By mid-day Sunday, the game was basically feature complete. I added several clues to the game in order to guide the player (The bucket silhouette at the chili pipe, for example) and we completed the fantastically drawn and animated PC reboot sequence. We needed to throw wrenches into the players' gameplay flow and not make the game boring!
The first prerelease build we put together late Sunday implemented the introduction cutscene which doubles as a sort of soft-tutorial for the player via posters on the wall - something that I had seen in several games I've been playing lately. It's a clever way to deliver nonintrusive "lessons" but I didn't have time to make it less...blatant? Either way, Prerelease 1 implemented some more room layout changes as well as freshening up the PC's player screen to be clearer.
And then... art happened.
Lurkin fired off what I can only describe as a barrage of absolutely amazing art and level layout changes that fully nailed what the game would become. It really hammered home the aesthetic of the game!
We buttoned up the title screen and game over screens really late on Monday night (after my day job) and managed to submit in time after fixing a few really nasty bugs (all of them having to do with that damn chili bucket. I swear...) Unfortunately, a few bugs remain (such as the layering issues on a few resource nodes and some funny collision nonsense with the upper part of Mr. X's head. But that's the joy of game jams!
Thanks for taking the time to read and follow our progress! If you haven't already, you can check out You Live Like This? and vote! We're all doing our best to get out there and rate other games as well.
Until next time!
This LD, I teamed up with Black Totem Games to put together Reaction Transaction, a game where you are an alchemist - a potion seller, if you will - and your goal is to fulfill the needs of your customers!
From start to finish, this project came together really nicely with relatively few bugs (which is scary!) and what we feel is a pretty decent core gameplay loop. With a cast of over a dozen unique and fully written characters - there's tons of character and some easter eggs in this entry. Maybe even a famous knight - one of which has had a neverending quest for only the strongest of potions!
Featuring art from the illustrious Lurkin McClerkin and dialogue written by the eloquent and whimsical mind of Nimmems, you're bound to get a kick out of our entry.
Is your interest piqued? Head on over to our game page and give our game a spin. We'll be sure to return the favor!