We're 4.2 dudes in a basement, one of which is drawing all assets by hand on paper. We have 1.5 programmers, and the rest spend their time on miscellaneous tasks in Unity, Photoshop, or wasting it. So far so good. We reached our first arbitrary milestone, which is whatever can be seen below :)

You play as a grave robber, and your quest is to find the treasure. Other than that we will try to add as much content as we can before the time runs out. Disturbing the dead will result in more enemies spawning and chasing the player. The more health the player has, the more aggressive the zombies will become. The player must avoid uncovering the wrong graves while searching for the treasure and clues.

It's been a long time since I submitted something for compo (it was LD32 i think) since I always forget to plan for this event. This time however I'm ready, and have planned my entire weekend for this. I just hope we get a fun theme! :)

My setup this time will be the following: - Photoshop, Pyxel edit, or Paint.NET for graphics. (Blender if I go 3D) - Cubase and EWQL for music. - Kitten for cuddles and moral support. - As for game engine I'm planning on using Unity. Although I'm currently working on a lightweight 2D library for C++ with a friend, so if I finish that before the weekend I might use it. The downside with that library is that it only supports windows at the moment. - I'll be using Sourcetree, Git and Github for VC - I'm gonna try to remember making a timelapse with chronolapse!

Best of luck to you all!

Today has been a bit slow when it comes to coding and design, so I'm a bit behind schedule. On the other hand I've gotten all sound effects done, some music for the game, and some music for the menu.

Here's how the game looks right now

And here's the model for the player character ^^

I'm suffering from a severe food coma right now, so being productive is far less tempting than sitting in the couch and watching anime. I'm however finally starting to feel like I have a playable game, and the only thing missing for it to count as something "finished" is a system for spawning enemies in defined patterns, and If I get some time over I'd like to add some more enemies ^^

It was a long time ago I finished a game for the compo, so even though I wasted a lot of time sitting and playing it I'm super happy with the result! ^^

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/$80445

You can listen to the soundtrack here: https://soundcloud.com/adamwallberg/felocity-soundtrack-ludum-dare-41

I'm gonna do a proper post mortem some other day, but for now I think my cat has the right idea c:

I made a timelapse for my game Felocity ^^ There are a few time skips when I took breaks and forgot to resume the recording, but I managed to capture most of the process. https://youtu.be/D8ulhOZDe7M

The game can be played and rated here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/felocity

Game:

The game is called Felocity. It's made for compo and can be played here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/felocity

What went bad?

Design

First of all, I wasn't super exited for this theme. I got really hung up on the incompatible part, which made me discard most of my favorite ideas since they were (in my opinion) too compatible. In the end I decided to go for an idea that I wanted to work on rather than an idea that followed the theme perfectly. This was to keep my motivation up, which I guess worked in the end. However, I spent very little time on the specifics, so my game ended up a bit confusing. I think if I only spent half an hour extra on figuring out a concrete design, the entire jam would have gone a lot smoother.

Wasting time

With risk of sounding narcissistic: I honestly think I could have had a game with double as much content (levels, enemies, weapons, tutorial, etc.) if I hadn't wasted so much time. I felt really slow the entire jam, always being slightly tired, so I ended up spending more time playing my game than working on it. I didn't really want to take a nap either, since that was a waste of time, which just made it worse. Note for the next time: nap if you are tired. Kindergarten had it right!

What went well?

Planning

I planned properly for this jam, starting to write down a schedule for each part (design, programming, audio, graphics, etc.) so that I could have an overview of how I was doing. Earlier jams I have been guessing, which can lead to laziness or stress depending on if I feel like I have a lot of time, or if I feel like I have too little time. This time it kept me motivated when laziness was taking over.

Music

I really went outside of my comfort zone with this one. I usually write metal or orchestral music, but this time I went for something more... Jazzy?? I'm not so sure about the genre. And while I only made a short loop for the in-game music, I'm really happy with how that turned out. I also spent some time making some small jingles for the main menu, and the game over screen, which could be considered bad prioritizing, but it really made the game feel more complete and polished.

Art

I really pushed myself to make the art quick, and not get hung up on details. It's very easy to get stuck tweaking individual pixels in these projects, especially with pixel art, but in the end very few look at individual pixels. I also decided to use my cat, and pictures of it, as reference material for the drawing. It really helped with coloring since I'm colorblind, but doesn't really help with anatomy, since pixel art is rarely correct in that way.

Feedback

By feedback I mean input- and output feedback (I guess you could call is responsiveness). I'm really happy with how the game feels to play. While it doesn't have many features, or good design for that matter, it really feels good to shoot the gun, and it really feels powerful when you take damage. I give the credit for this to the sound effects, which also helps with making the game feel more "alive".

Ending note

I don't want to make this post too long, so I'm ending here. It was really fun coming back to Ludum Dare, and I'm definitely gonna do it more often than before. I'm really impressed by some of the games I've seen so far! Good job everyone! ^^