Hey all, Just saying hey and looking forward to my first Ludum Dare on the 24th 😀

As per the rules Ive uploaded possible “libraries/code” im going to be using to my website. Ive also got the page for the LD24 entry ready as soon as its complete. Im not going to be there at the start of the compo, for me in the UK it starts at 2am GMT so im sleeping at 9pm 2nite and waking probably about 4 or 5, so i will miss a few hours but be raring to go! Good luck everybody 😀

My website

Ok so just over 14 hours in to the compo, 4 hours of actual work done for me and ive made reasonable progress, firstly I struggled for an hour to come up with an idea I would be happy with. Then laying down tracks I got to work like a mad man, soon realising I was making a ton of mistakes I decided to resort to my trusty pen and paper and old faithful, list making

Heres a screenie of current progress:

So Ive got 2 bullet points from my list complete, 6 more to go but their much bigger than the first two so better lay some more tracks 😀

Almost there, maybe, ive got one last bit of major functionality to program then onto audio, and finally fluffing. Hopefully not a late one

Ive taken to watching my creation evolve, problem is alter ego has just given me a disciplinary back to work then …

Yey, submited!

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=14195

I’m looking forward to playing all your games, just as soon as my eyes gain their moisture back, midnight here to calling it a night, see you 2mo

Highly anticipated LD! Since my first LD last time which was a great and enjoyable experience and upon critical feedback ive wanted to 1up myself. I recieved great feedback and through improving my art,gameplay and narrative
design I look forward to the festivities

Tools:
Unity 3 – Javascript
Photoshop
Pyxel Edit
3DS MAX
Audacity
BFXR

Hey,

Last time I took part I was fortunate to have my own hosting space so I put my game on my website. Unfortunately I no longer have this space so Im wondering where to host now, kongregate and newgrounds are the only two that spring to mind, im not keen on kongregate, also im developing in unity so im not sure newgrounds hosts that type.

My question is where, in your opinion, is a good place to host with regards to this competition?

Cheers

Rob

Luvin the crispy filled pastry round 😀

Hey all,

Hope all is going well with your games, this is our first post, sorry for being late ‘in the day’ but we wanted to make more progress before we blogged.

Firstly let me introduce us,

Im Rob Yates (programmer, art, design, audio)

My glamorous partner in crime and brand new to game development is Katrina Reynolds 😛 (art, design)

We decided to go with an evil xmas villain theme similar to the grinch. The blurb goes like this (working progress): 2D run around, steal presents, load up and drive your evil sleigh, unload it at your lair, avoid police patrols and stalk santa’s trail. The ultimate goal is to be the best xmas wrecker(% grade awarded).

Heres a screenshot of our current progress:

Also we loved the goat theme so we designated the creature pulling the evil sleigh to be a goat, check out his awesome pixelness 😀

Heres our progress:

• 2D Character movement with animation
• Village level graphics
• Vehicle
• Steal presents
• Unload present to vehicle
• Unload vehicle to lair
• Police patrols
• Santa deliver presents
• House level graphics
• Lair level graphics
• SFX and theme music
• Menu system
• Polish(fun stuff like more xmas decor and snow)

So theres a fair amount todo but were confident, see how it goes

Oh yeah!

Heres our progress:

• 2D Character movement with animation
• Village level graphics
• Vehicle
• Steal presents
• Unload present to vehicle
• Unload vehicle to lair
• Police patrols
• Santa deliver presents(half done)
• House level graphics
• Lair level graphics
• SFX and theme music
• Menu system
• Polish(fun stuff like more xmas decor and snow)

Check out our game: Grand Theft Crimbo

Heres our final progress:

• 2D Character movement with animation
• Village level graphics
• Vehicle
• Steal presents
• Unload present to vehicle
• Unload vehicle to lair
• Police patrols
• Santa deliver presents(scrapped for demo)
• House level graphics
• Lair level graphics(scrapped for demo)
• SFX and theme music
• Menu system
• Polish(fun stuff like more xmas decor and snow)(not complete)

Post Mortem to come in the morning, sleep is calling

Hey all,

Firstly hope all went well with your compo and jam games and I hope you all enjoyed the development.

First note is that Team RobKat is a newly formed game development team, im joined by a new to the industry artist and designer, Katrina Reynolds. Much props to her as she quickly picked up all the niggles game development throws at you 😀

This weekend we developed a game called Grand Theft Crimbo using Unity, originally we were going to call it The Epic Robbery That Ruined Xmas AKA Grand Theft Crimbo but we decided to keep it simple.

The game is about an elf wronged by Santa, the story is kept open for players to imagine. Just know this, this elf is angry, super evil angry. His trusty sidekick, evil goat, drives his sleigh as you terrorise a small village near you evil lair. The plan is to steal presents and not get caught so Santa looks like he didn’t bother with presents this year.

What Went Right

As mentioned before we our a new team and it went really well, we worked cohesively and it was great fun.

We managed to develop most of the mechanics we wanted, stealing presents, driving a sleigh, basic collision, avoiding police.

Most of the graphics required for the game were made in time, its a shame we didnt have time to make the lair, individual house and village decorations but as a game prototype were happy.

Prior to the LD25 jam we decided to do a creative exercise where each voting round we would come up with 5 ideas for each theme, thats 240 game ideas. It really helped us to get into the creative mind set and we also now have 10 other really good game ideas to experiment with.

What Went Wrong

TileMapping – Boy did I not know how complex a tile mapping system can be. I started by creating a script to plugin prefabs for tiles, but soon realised even a small tilemap has a large number of individual tiles, meaning I would have to make every tile as a prefab and I can guarantee the performance would have sucked. What I really wanted was a system like RPGMaker but there wasnt a chance in homers noggin I was going to complete a system like that in time. Of couse there was always the option of using rpgmaker to make the game and that certainly would have saved time but we really wanted to have the game playable on a web page. Ive seen the work some people have been doing with a html5 port of rpgmaker but the api seemed complex and not something I had time to learn.

Unity was not without its difficulty though, ive been using unity for just over a year and im fairly confident but there were 2 things during this jam that really stumped me, thankfully the unity community is awesome and a quick google search sorted the problems. One of the problems was activating disabled game objects with children.

It wasn’t just unity specific problems that stumped me though, in fact occasionally I made my own problems, there was this really annoying situation where the police car wasnt changing animation cel, it didn’t even show any graphic. I went over and over my code which I had ripped from my other code for the character. The problem was in the fact that the code did something specific for the character but I needed it to work another way for the police car. Turns out the code I was trying to get working was in a custom function and not in an Update(), Doh

Unfortunately the game was released with bugs and there’s quite a few, Its been suggested in the comments for a post-compo version with all the problems fixed and while were at it we should add some more features, were definitely up for this and hopefully in the next few weeks we should have something to release

Improvements

The tilemapping situation presents an intricate problem which I will need to sit down and plan a strategy to attack it, there are two ways, tackle the problem myself or find a third party software. Actually theres a third way and as im writing this I think I might go with this one. A measure of the two. I have been using Pyxel Edit for a while now and I think its amazing, but it too like our game has many bugs and could benefit from some much needed features. If possible I will see if I can offer my programming skills to enable the development to move forward. A key feature(already in Pyxel edit) is export as xml/text. Using this I could develop a content processor making the whole tilemapping process smooth and trouble free.

As previously said were going to fix the bugs and release a post-compo version.

Were super excited about going back through the game and adding polish like xmas decor for the houses and village.

Its been great fun, hope you enjoy the game:P

Team RobKat (Katrina Reynolds, Rob Yates)

Hey all, Ive been thinking for sometime I want to switch from Unity for 2d based games.

Ive used Unity for 2 LD’s and I used XNA prior to that and what I found was that while Unity is perfectly capable and in some cases awesome for 2d it feels like im fighting with the engine to craft my game.

Ive done a little research into 2d javascript game engines and decided this is the way I want to go.

Crafty, Melon and Impact pop up quite a lot and of course there’s Construct2 but I think I would prefer more code control. I would also prefer open source, some of the above being licensed.

I would love to here your recommendations for a 2d javascript game engine

Were in. 3rd LD :). Using LD26 as our first Java application development. We know nearly all keynotes say not to use the LD as an experiment regarding new languages or sdk etc but to hell with it, LD is the only time we finish our creations (or near enough).  Any way as we have stated before were fed up with the lack of control with unity, true it gives some back but it also takes too much away at the same time. Were really interested in Android development so being a bit backwards (and im not going to score any points with this decision) were going to release the android version first then follow up with a port to web and standalone.

Here’s the Vitals:

• Platform: Android
• Language: Java
• Graphics: pyxel edit, pickle, photoshop
• Sounds(depends on theme): audacity, bfxr, autotracker-BU, virtual keyboard?, guitar?, bongo?

bring on the good times buru…

Shingeki No Kyojin, a great new anime but episode three features awesome Potato Girl!

Gonna be honest, was not happy at all this morning, Minimalism! what the frick I am meant to do with that! Then I started thinking perhaps im struggling with this because unlike other themes this theme has been done to death in indie games. So the difficulty here was coming up with something different.

I’m not a minimalist as you can see from lunch…

So im definitely out of my comfort zone. I did say I was not going to use Unity but after spending 4 hours this morning with no design I decided to get the latest unity and just start messing around. Out of the LD’s Ive been in this has to be the best, I love experimenting and not knowing what the hell im doing. Maybe I might have a clue later on but for now im riffing away with out the foggiest.

Here is a screenie of what I got so far 😀

Hooray! Submitted 😀

Will write a well needed post-mortem tomorrow/later when I get up.

For now we are very happy with how it went and heres our favourite screenie from development…

Check out hedraSeed here

Hey all, hope every one had a gd LD.

Unfortunately due to work and a power failure I didnt submit in time, I thought I might be able to submit today after work under the ‘jam catergory’ as the rules are more relaxed but apparently not. So im submitting my link here, I wont get votes but heres my efforts

Grez

Have fun, feel free to comment, any problems let me know.

Cheers,

Rob

Hey all, Looking forward to a new LD, going to be Jamming due to work commitments. Hopefully we will submit this time, last one we submitted was LD26 but we came close with LD30, missed the deadline by a few hours and wasn’t able to submit

Ok so game plan:

Engine: Unity

Art: Pyxel Edit, Photoshop, 3DS Max

Music: Midi Keyboard, Guitar, Audacity, Ignite, BFXR,  maybe Ableton Lite if I need it and have time

Food: Having just discovered the delights of Mocha im sure there will be a plenty. Not sure about munch, we tend to hit  a wall with idea generation a few hours in so we go for a walk to the local super market, get creative with food and by the time we’ve returned home and made it we have an idea in the bag.

Anyway have a good one and I’m super glad the themes have a had good shake up this time round

TEAM ROBKAT