Hello everyone! This will be my first Ludum Dare! I’m still not sure, if I will be participating alone as part of the compo or if one or two friends will join me for a jam.

I will be doing something in 2D using Unity 5 with Visual Studio 2015 as well as some custom scripts:

• A JSON parser (by Wyrmtale) that will be used to load an external config file during the initialization of the game. This way I can just make a build, send the game to a friend and he can help balancing it without the need to install any stuff like Unity. Very useful!
• An EventBus that came into existence during the last Global Game Jam. My team figured out that an event-based approach fits very well, if you develop your game with self-aware GameObjects.

You can use my template project (https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/12595295/LD33.zip)! Check GameApp.cs to see how the config parsing and the EventBus works! I’ve provided event classes for void, integer, float and string!

If my controls get too complex, I will be using a 360 GamePad with the neat InControl Library:
https://github.com/pbhogan/InControl

Have a great Ludum Dare everyone!

Alright, time for my first post! My game is called „Scary Steve” and I decided to take the theme very literally, mainly because I had a neat idea and also because I really like Pixar’s „Monsters, Inc.“.

The Game

You play Steve, a ghost that hides in the closets of child bedrooms. Your goal is to reach the bed and scare the hell out of the child using just your arrow keys. While you’re trying to do that, you have three obstacles to overcome:

• Time is running against you!
• Various objects on the floor (toys, etc.) will make noise!
• You can’t see very well, so you’ll only get to know what’s in the room as you walk through it. The cool kids call it “fog of war”.

If the time runs out or you make too much noise, you lose one life. Complete as many levels as you can before you hit the “Game Over”-Screen! To give you an impression, here’s a video:

As you can see, I was trying to capture the spirit of NES style arcade games like Pacman. Actually, the game is optimized for the original 256×240 resolution of the NES and Stefan is working with the NES color palette. The whole game loop is already implemented and the only missing things are the actual winning condition and more obstacles. For now, there is only one floor obstacle to test things.

So what’s next?

First of all, I decided to switch from compo to jam, because I procrastinate too much and due to the fact that I am not working alone anymore! My dear friend Roman will provide some audio, while Stefan will take care of the beautiful pixels. You can see and hear the first results in the video above. Shout out to you two! You rock!

It’s currently 7 PM in Germany and I will spend the rest of the evening including all the resources that appear in my Dropbox. Tomorrow will be about balancing and enhancing everything I have. I don’t know if I will be able to implement various levels or if there will be only one level as a proof of concept. We’ll see! Comments are appreciated!

It’s 2 PM in Germany, so if I want to get a decent amount of sleep tonight, I’ll have about 10 hours left to finish everything up. I completed all mechanics, added some sounds and the music and made a first WebGL Build, so you can play it in your browser. Why don’t you just go ahead?

http://scarysteve.lpeterke.de/

As you can see, some sprites are still missing. I hope to get some more variation into it. For the levels I decided to write a function to generate these randomly. I figured that I don’t have enough time left to make handcrafted levels. Instead I’ll just try to improve my generator function so the final game will have a decent difficulty curve.

The pieces are coming together very nicely:

You can play the current build while I’m resolving the last things on my to-do list.

http://scarysteve.lpeterke.de/