This is our first Ludum Dare, but we will try to finish something! Just doing the gamejam though, not the competition!
We are both artists so hopefully we can make something pretty yet playable.
Game Engine: CraftStudio
Sound: SFXR
Music: Musagi
Extra Graphics: Photoshop, Illustrator and possibly Blender
After a lot of technical difficulties we are finally getting into the swing of things. Our game will be a puzzle game where the final piece of the puzzle is you. You are a robot that can transform into a pixel, use the unfinished image as an obstacle course to get to the spot of the missing pixel in order to complete each canvas. We will try to get this finished even though we were held back by about a day of work. Here is what the protagonist looks like.
Next step will be animating and we are currently working on player movement and a test level as well.
Okay, so there is only 17 hours left. On the bright side, we have most of the game mechanics set up in one way or another, I’ll be getting some sleep soon and the next few things will be to change the music to something more fitting, getting the main menu into the actual game and making some levels! It’s really not the most fancy game for game design, but it’s definitely minimalist. Unfortunately since we are using physics for collisions, Craftstudio’s HTML5 exporter won’t work for this game. It does export to Linux, Windows and OSX though. So once we are done we will be posting all of those. For now though I’m tired, so here is the Windows version in the zip folder. Just extract it and click on the file with the controller icon.
The name of the game is ▀ we figured that was a pretty simple yet descriptive name for the game.
Here is some screenshots of what the progress looks like so far.
Here is the basic test level ktiger34 made. He has been having trouble with his internet connection which was problematic for a game engine that requires you to be connected, also important for sending files between eachother, but he eventually was able to get on and fixed a bunch of the problems I was having with animations not playing and getting the overall movement mechanics working. I was able to set up a “Level Complete” scenario, the first few levels will be basic platforming, but I think we can maybe add some block pushing mechanics to add a little depth. The key will be that each level will resemble a pixelated/minimalistic object with some pixels missing. You will need to push blocks to reach higher places, and use them to fill in the missing areas. When you manage to fill in the pixels you win the level and go onto the next one.
We might not really be able to get too much done level wise before the deadline since we had problems getting the game engine working for the first 24 hours. But I feel like what we were even able to do so far on this is quite the accomplishment for us.
There is some misalignment issues on the menu, but those will be easy to fix.
This will be my second LD Jam, but this time I’m going to work solo and I’ll be using…
Engine and Code: Unity 4 w/Javascript(Unityscript)
Graphics: Adobe Illustrator, Flash and Photoshop
Sound and Music: FL Studio and Adobe Soundbooth
Last time I ran into a few more problems than I expected so I lost a lot of time and made my entry look almost look like a game (a little incomplete), hopefully this time with a little prep to make sure all my tools are working I’ll be able to make something that resembles a complete game.
Well this is my second LD entry finished. Yay! Overall I feel pretty good about what I created for this jam especially considering this is my first game where I worked entirely on my own to create. It’s was a rough road though, this is my first real time programming a full game, the last game jam I used Craftstudio’s visual editor and I had a friend with more coding experience than me working on it as well. Anyways, the overall concept of the game is a murder mystery style game. I intended it to be much for polished, with a little more animation, intro, better audio, but I guess the important thing is that I reached the deadline, something I’ve always struggled with in the passed.
Anyways, here is a breakdown of how I think the project went.
The Good- The good is that it’s functional! Getting the looping animations working didn’t take too long. Or the script for having the characters always facing the camera, which was a necessity when using the 2d characters in 3d space. I felt pretty good about the art as well. While the animations could have been better, I feel like I did a good job at getting some interesting looking characters made in good time (even though I wish I could have had more characters.) I’ve always been more of an artist and not a programmer, so getting lots of the artwork done faster helped me sink in more time into the code.
The Bad- It took me forever to get the GUI code working, and in the end I spent at least 5 hours working on what ended up being a stupidly simple solution. This didn’t just happen once while coding, which quite a few times. Another bad point is the lack of content, I was originally planning to set it up so it would have about 3 different crime scenes using the same assets, it would just use a random number generator on the main screen to send you to one of the different scenes, but due to time constraints and being dead tired I never got around to being able to do that. Maybe I’ll try to polish it a little later, but I feel like the short time it takes to see everything the game has is a bit of a problem.
Then there is the actual writing. Today I went back and found spelling errors in dialogue, and the overall “mystery” falls flat on it’s face pretty fast, overall, while I feel like visually it’s nice, the game itself as a game just doesn’t seem to be as fun as I imagined. A large part of this probably comes from the fact that the dialogue was done last. Other problems are just the overall jerkiness of the controls. I should have had the audio for the 10 second mind readings stop if you cycle through all the actual on screen text for a character and use a button to talk to characters rather than just walking into them.
The Horrible- The audio was probably the worst thing about the game. This is especially a problem when the 10 second theme element I used relies entirely on the audio. I essentially overslept and ran out of time to actually record voice and audio using my new Blue Bluebird microphone (which I really wanted to use) so I had to opt in to using the voice synthesizer that is included in FL Studio. I also tried doing music but I just couldn’t get anything that sounded right, I wish I could have because the silence of the game, especially on the main menu and the win and lose scenes could have really used it.
Overall/Bits and Bobs- I think if I went back to work on it again, there would be a few things I would change. For starters, I would re-record all of the audio to it’s much easier to understand, that is, after I add more characters, more rooms, objects that have evidence, and and overall better story/mystery to solve. Then I would make it so when you are in range with people, you would only heard the 10 second mind readings while you are talking, and it would stop when you stop talking to them. I would also add more animations to characters, such as talking animations that I was planning to add but didn’t add because of problems manipulating my animation script and time for doing the art, as well as animation for L. Dare so he could look like he’s walking when you would move. Short animated intro that gave more insight on what you are actually doing as well as audio/better ending screens would help it feel more rewarding as well. Oh well though. Code wise there is a few things I would probably do different. I never learned how to utilize prefabs in Unity either (didn’t use them at all for this game.) and those would probably have helped quite a bit with improving development, so that’s something I’ll have to practice for future projects. I might go back and fix things up for this game, but I still feel like what I got done this time around isn’t so bad considering my lack of programming know-how.
That’s all from me! I’m not the best at writing these things, so I don’t know how insightful this post will really be, but I hope you enjoy my game!
Hey! It’s my 3rd Ludum Dare and I’m hoping to do even better in this one!.
Tools:
3D: Blender
2D: Photoshop/Fire Alpaca
Game Engine: Unity with C#
I’m hoping the theme works well for a 3d game idea, otherwise I might go with Unity’s fancy new 2d shtuff. Good luck to everyone!
Unity hasn’t been my best friend today. I was going to do a 3d platformer about a robot escaping a factory during a power outage, powering himself, doors and other machines to help along the way. I even spent most of this week practicing rigging and animation. Unfortunately, Unity started to give me a bunch of errors and problems that I couldnt find any info online of, and that was before I could get to doing any scripting at all.
So here is idea number 2. “No! Your Only Get One (Treat)!”
You are a dog and your human gave you a treat, they say you only get one but you want more. In fact, you want them ALL!
It’s a 2d platformer about moving furniture and whatnot to reach the high shelves where the tasty bag o’ biscuits reside.
The animation was done in Pencil2D and I managed to pack it into a sprite sheet with Shoebox
Think I’ll enter the Jam this time around if I have enough time off work.
Tools–
Engine: Unity3d
3D Art: Blender
2D Art: Krita, Gimp, Inkscape, FireAlpaca
Sounds: Microphone, Audacity
Music: Musagi, FL Studio and Microphone
Hopefully the theme is super duper 😀
This LD I’m working with my friend Jeff. I’ll do the art and he will do the code and we will both work on the other parts together. Here is the tools I know that we are using.
Unreal Engine 4
Visual Studio
Blender
Krita
FL Studio
Musagi
Audacity
We may add some other stuff to this like SFXR based on the design of the game but that’s the gist of it!
Hola! Think I’m going to make a solid attempt this LD!
Tools:
3D
——-
Blender
Substance Painter
2D
——-
Krita
Clip Paint Studio
CACAni
Music & Sound
——-
FL Studio
Audacity
Twitch Stream: http://www.twitch.tv/beardbotnik