Seems more or less mandatory to post an “I’m in”!
This is my first LD – I will be working on a tight schedule since I have figured out I will only have a total of about 18 hours available over the weekend.
Haven’t decided on frameworks yet… Either MonoGame with Coco-Sharp for C# development or Phaser for JavaScript development.
For extra inspiration around the theme I will be using Game Idea Generator: http://orteil.dashnet.org/gamegen
I got started at about 7:30 today (AM CET), my original plan was to start about 1,5 hrs earlier but due to some issues last night which had to be fixed with the virtual machine that I use for game development I needed to sleep a little longer than I had planned. This will eat into the total time that I have available so I will need to adjust my plan to account for it… I will only be working with the game on Saturday due to previous plans for Sunday so in total I have a maximum of 16 hours available for completing my entry.
In order to be able to complete something which can at least be entered into the compo I plan to use a stringent time box system, a combination of Scrum, Kanban and the Pomodoro technique. My initial time box plan follows. Each time box is 30 minutes in total, starts with planning so that the right things get focused on and ends with 5 minutes summing up and administration. In total for Ludum Dare on Saturday I will have a theoretical maximum of 32 time boxes, in reality several of these will be used for food and other worldly things…
TB01 : Game theme & mechanics (08:00)
TB02 : Game theme & mechanics
TB03 : Rough placeholder art
TB04 : Rough prototype programming
TB05 : Rough prototype programming (10:00)
TB06 : Rough prototype programming
TB07 : Rough prototype programming
TB08 : Placeholder sounds
TB09 : Placeholder sounds (12:00 lunch?)
TB10 : Placeholder music
TB11 : Placeholder music
TB12 : Retrospective – more game design
TB13 : Refactoring (14:00)
TB14 : Refactoring
TB15 : Refactoring
TB16 : Refactoring
TB17 : Prototype art (16:00)
TB18 : Prototype art
TB19 : Prototype sounds
TB20 : Prototype sounds
*TB = Time Box
Time boxes 21+ will be planned when I run my retrospective hopefully…
This is my raw summary of what I have done in the first three time boxes, almost completely unedited…
TB01 Log
Looking for inspiration and ideas using http://orteil.dashnet.org/gamegen, flickr and google image search.
The top game ideas that I have so far are not very good and not specific enough to start any kind of programming, art or audio…
Connected Worlds primary idea: A browser game where you interrogate forests with nuclear warfare.
After finding some great pictures on flickr with trees and plants connecting that is something that I think will go into the game design. Nature connecting with itself or with other things…
https://www.flickr.com/photos/nuddaladden/12129738594
https://www.flickr.com/photos/nicholas_t/7174698629
https://www.flickr.com/photos/joceykinghorn/9887207575
https://www.flickr.com/photos/tabor-roeder/4546391944
TB02 Log
Spend most if this time thinking about how the game idea could become a cohesive game… Not easy! Something with plants growing and blocking your way and then using nukes to clear a path. Not entirely politically correct… Timed game so you loose if the timer runs out but you can gain additional time by picking up stuff along the way. The timer is probably just that the trees grow and take up all the space that is available and then you get blocked by them…
Gaah!!! time ran out on my two initial game design time boxes, will need to add one more and shift the rest of my plan forwards.
TB03 Log
Got the game idea more fleshed out – feeling quite good about it. Started on some rough placeholder art but nothing too complete or complicated yet. Already behind by at least one time box – so that is an issue with regards to the limited amount of time that is available for me over the weekend. Taking a break now to focus on getting a time-lapse setup, blogging reading about what others have done and then moving into my work room to continue with something that can run on a device/computer.
Summary
I’m a little (or a lot) behind but still feeling good about being able to get something completed – this is probably due to me only working on ideas and placeholders so far and avoid all the really difficult stuff… In addition to this I haven’t included time in my plan for editing timelapse video and posting updates. Below is the placeholder art that has been finished and a timelapse of the initial work.
You are a planet created in the big bang looking for a safe place to live. Galaxies and star systems are moving around and pulsating some are friendly and some are dangerous.
Movement: When two systems touch each other the player can move between them for free. The player can spend dark matter energy to create a worm hole between any two systems. The further away the systems are the more energy is required. Energy expenditure is determined by the length of time the player taps/clicks on the target system, if too little energy is spent the wormhole is not strong enough to transport the player.
Energy: Energy is spent creating wormholes. Energy is earned by resting inside a system (automatically recharges), stable systems give very little energy while unstable systems power up energy much faster.
Dangers: Unstable systems remove energy from the player whenever they touch other systems or if the player spends too much time waiting in them. Super novas expand and then explode destroying the player if they are inside the super nova and sapping energy from them if they are in an adjoining system. Black holes contract and suck in adjoining systems destroying them and the player if they are inside such a system.
Color coded galaxies (not sure about the colors and visuals yet):
Summary of the last three timeboxes, which led up to this point (I am way behind were I need to be…)
TB04
Lunch break and setting up desktop workspace = waste of valuable time… 
TB05
Papper prototyping and concept drawings, name decided “Versum”!
TB06
Game brief and simple mechanics explained.
Very little visible progress has been made. I now have a framework in place – CocosSharp & MonoGame and entry points for running the game on Windows 8, iOS, OSX and generic Win32. Unfortunately I have an offset issue with rendering on Windows 8 so most of the time nothing is visible on the screen.
Time box 07
Ran out of space on a virtual disk and needed to spend some time cleaning up stuff… Setting up basic application frameworks in Xamarin Studio.
Time box 08
Setting up projects to enable basic compile with CocosSharp. Finished cleanup of virtual disk to enable work in multiple environments.
Time box 09
Got Framework in place for CocosSharop and Xamarin with MonoGame for iOS, OSX, Win8 and win32 (more or less). Cant get stuff to render properly in Windows 8!
Timelapse for these three timeboxes and the previous three:
Progress has been slow to say the least! I am less than halfway to where I should be now according to my original plan… I am still having issue with getting things rolling the way they should both with the Windows 8 version of the game (which annoys the hell out of me but I can drop that pretty easily) and with my Virtual Machine for Windows development. If the virtual environment doesn’t work then I will not be able to complete this.
I am not giving up yet, but I may have to rethink what I try to get into the final game. I only have working 5-6 hours left, perhaps I can squeeze a couple more hours out of tomorrow but if I manage to complete it’s going to be tight…
Tags: compo, motivation, progress
Still not going as I had hoped… I underestimated the learning curve for switching to CocosSharp with the nuget deployed version of MonoGame compared to using the GitHub master versions of Cocos2d-XNA and MonoGame which is what I have used previously. Mostly everything works but when I get stuck I can’t just leave things unresolved, which is good for learning but bad for a 48 hour challenge! So I get dragged down into trying to figure out how to resolve issues instead of pushing the game challenge forwards. Sigh…
This is what I have been doing plus there has been some time in-between time boxes for research and also additional time outside in the real world.
Time box 10
Fixing the Windows 8 rendering issues – worst case scenario drop windows 8 full screen for now. There was a break in the middle of this one for some real world issues (food and wine).
Time box 11
Gaah!!! All the stuff that was broken (and took me hours looking at) is back up and working now without me doing anything other than eating and having a glass of wine… Setting up content asset project to get some visible stuff in there. Made massive invisible progress!
Time box 12
Trying to get a sprite on every device. Still issues with design time resolution. Seems almost fixed now but still no sprites on devices and more performance issues with the virtual machine that makes it impossible to work. Checked out some of the other games instead…
Time box 13
Setting up application resolution settings and researching how to handle multiple resolutions using CocosSharp. I think I understand how this is all supposed to work now (finally).
http://youtu.be/u8AAgVipzg8
I realise that I will not be completing my entry in time for participating in the compo. I have let myself be sidetracked by technical issues which was what I set out to not allow.
I will come back to the game – maybe complete it as a “One Game A Month”. Anyway my last timelapse is here, as you can see at the end I got the sprites moving the way I wanted on OSX, Win32 and iOS – so in that sense it was a success…
This time doing something different – I am planning to bring my kids and some of their friends into the mix! Not sure if it is madness or genius… So targeting the jam not the compo.
I will give them a brief intro to programming in Kodu and then help them make some games with it based on the theme. For my youngest I will be doing the programming for her so will probably not be using Kodu for that, undecided between MonoGame/Cocossharp, SuperPowers or Phaser.
Most of the kids will probably only participate on Saturday – I may try to polish what I create (if it seems worth it) on Sunday & Monday, we will see what happens.
Not sure how this is going to go… While coaching the young boys I have been doing LD32 with I have also been helping my 9 year old daughter develop the concept for her game. Mostly it has been about controlling scope/ambition creep! Seeing as this is the very first time she has been involved in any kind of software project she really has no concept of how long things take to realize. So without further ado here is the concept for “Nallies’ late for the party”.
You play as Nallie a cute teddy bear, she is late for a party and risks missing the bus if she can’t get dressed in time. Unfortunately there is a mischievous dragon in her house making it very difficult for her to get ready.
A flower for Nallie’s hat
A necklace for Nallie
Shoes for Nallie
A dress for Nallie
Start button
A hat for Nallie to put on.
Nallie’s house
Screen layout
Nallie spits from her milkshake at the dragon.
Nallie’s wardrobe
My next step is to take the raw scanned art and put it into a JavaScript game with the basic mechanics in place so it is possible for her to playtest, that may be the final version of the game depending on what else happens over the weekend… But I am hoping that we will have time to trace the art into vectors with Inkscape so that we can give it a slightly cleaner appearance.
Didn’t think I would make it but turns out I’ll have a little time for this so I’m in again. Third time. Last time I actually got something out so high hopes this time. I’ll be in the Jam and I already have an idea which I will try shoehorn the theme into – probably not great but that’s my plan!
Tools
Visual Studio 2015
Xamarin Studio
Xamarin
Stock photos
Noun project
Difficult to shoehorn my idea into this 😕 I’m not delighted with the theme, but I am already semi-committed… My game is going to be about managing certain aspects of a business so I think I need to approach the theme using appropriate dictionary definitions.
Monster (with variants from dictionary.com):
So the theme connection is probably that you are trying to create a huge, cool corporation using intimidating tactics.
Fourth attempt at LD. Again not much time I think…
First attempt at LD went well technically but didn’t result in a playable game, only stuff moving around on the screen with no incentive for the player to do anything.
Second LD resulted in a “game” created in the jam together with my daughter which was actually a little fun to play.
Third attempt failed on all fronts: too little time available, technical issues getting stuff running and no real game concept.
This time I will attempt to put together a super mini game using the Superpowers engine http://superpowers-html5.com/ because I think it is so cool being able to jam together, simultaneously working on a project, but it is more for getting used to the engine than anything else. I may be able to convince my son to provide som input in which case I will go for the jam otherwise the compo… Won’t be spending much time on it – just using it as an excuse to learn stuff and participate in the event because it is cool!
Engine: SuperPowers
Audio: Internet blip generators…
Graphics: Gimp for pixelated crap…
Tags: imin
I kind of succeeded with something but not really with the game side. Had little inspiration and in the end not enough to actually do anything with the few good ideas I had. Spent most of my available time getting the SuperPowers collaborative engine and IDE running on a hosted Azure website, which in itself was pretty cool and taught me a lot about hosting multi-platform applications in Azure…
In the end my son and I were talking about what cool ideas others had implemented for the two button control theme. We joked about it would be fun if you used ALT-F4 as the control keys – so he quickly made a simple sprite animation and I threw together an even simpler game in my hosted SuperPowers IDE. Quite happy with the results considering we only spent about 3-4 hours doing the game and we used a hosted IDE to program it.
Tags: ld34 Postmortem
For the nth time in the Jam. The last few times I’ve managed to actually get stuff out the door which is more fun than just having learnt stuff!
This time both my kids (10 & 12 years old) will be helping out over the weekend.
Tooling:
Superpowers game engine & IDE
Typescript
Inkscape
Bfxr
Generated music
Just got started an hour or so ago. Kinda like the theme.
Brainstormed a bunch of ideas and we found something with a core essence of fun embedded in it somewhere – so now we just have to get working on extracting and refining it!
Brainstorming on paper
More paper-based concepts
You protect your core from attacking things by deflecting them using your shape. As your core gets broken down the shape you use changes and gets less stable, rotating and spinning making it more difficult to deflect the attackers. Have a bunch of ideas on power-ups and having the core regenerate but gotta start on getting a first playable concept up and running to test if it actually has any hope of working…
Took a long walk outside coming up with a list of todos for scope management and potential advanced game mechanics. Now off to coding a first prototype.
Lots of ideas starting off with a 0.1 prototype.
Typical LD for me, immediately hit an issue with the frameworks that I’m using which mean I had to spend a bunch of time trying to figure out how to fix it or work around it. Thankfully I could fix it and managed to get version “0.1” done before packing in for today.
Proof of concept
Got physics, touch and mouse control working. There is still no actual game play – so counting on getting that in place tomorrow. The aim is for you to control the small shape and deflect the other attacking shapes so that they don’t hit the bigger circle (your core). Powerups, particle effects and local multiplayer would be cool – but since it has taken a day to get here I think that may be overreaching! 
So I’ve stayed up way to late twiddling and tweaking with stuff that no one will ever see. Calling it for today and will be back on it for at least a few hours on Sunday. Still missing the core game play
Im in it for the Jam so not feeling any real pressure yet – have spent most of the day on non LD tasks but still managed to get some progression. Most important lesson today is realizing that the spin and shapeshift mechanism isn’t working for this game… Will probably mostly ditch the theme and go for getting the core of our idea implemented. I’m hoping to add a New Age feel to it and have difficulty levels associated to moods and feelings “How are you feeling?” : Sad (easy), Anxious, Angry (medium), Indifferent, Happy (hard), Nirvana (insane).
Have you found your quest? Traveller, look within and change yourself. You and I are pilgrims of the multiverse.
Travelling the multiverse…
That’s it for today.