I’m in (most likely). Although I registered to the mailing list a while ago, I’m about to participate for the first time in Ludum Dare this weekend.

I’ve been doing some game compos in the past:

• The retroremakes.com competitions (in 2003 and 2004 I think): Blockman3D (a remake of a game called Block Man by Soleau Software) and Pipetris (a combination of Pipe mania and Tetris). These were made in DarkBasic. I’m not sure about the exact years any more, as the competition’s pages aren’t online any more. Six or seven years seems to be too long for the memory of the Internet…
• The global game jam in 2009 and 2010: Burn them out (done in Python + pygame) and Vikings & Bankers (done in Unity3d).

If anyone would try any of the previous compo games I worked on I would suggest trying Vikings & Bankers. It contains some interesting puzzles, and I had a great time working on this. Especially the creation of the music and sound effects was a great experience; this was done with only a microphone and Audacity.

During weekdays I’m quite busy with PreviewLabs, a company specialized in rapid game prototyping. Rapid prototyping is actually not that different from making games successfully in 48h.

I feel like going for ‘The Competition’, but I may participate in ‘The Jam’ in case I can gather some people nearby.

So… the tools…

• hardware: MacBook Pro
• IDE/engine: Unity3D (using C#)
• graphics: Inkscape
• music and sound (if any): Audacity + microphone
• timelapse: I still need to find a good timelapse tool for OS X; if anyone can suggest one, please comment.
• furniture: a chair and table or desk

And to make this post more exciting; a random link to a website: PreviewLabs Wow. Out of all the millions of websites on the Internet, it happened to be the website of my company. Amazing!

As some people are adding crazy constraints to the already constrained process of making a game on your own in 48 hours (like programming an entry in assembly language), I’m also adding a – more modest – constraint to the game I’ll be making:

I’ll make a ‘physics game’ using the built-in Unity3D’s physics engine for this one. This could make it more challenging, as this kind of physics are a lot harder to tune than custom physics.

For the compo entries I did in the past, and for most prototypes PreviewLabs developed, I programmed my own physics. This is often the fastest solution, as you can implement the simplest physics model needed and save a lot of time on tuning while having full control over the physics’ behavior.

If the theme makes it too hard to create a physics game, I’ll at least use some physics in the game (even if it’s for a background effect).

By the way, by ‘physics game’ I mean a game in which the core game mechanics are relying on the physics engine.

BoulderBridge Prototype

The screenshot above is from ‘BoulderBridge’, the first prototype we did with PreviewLabs. It’s a ‘physics game’ with a concept similar to bridge builder or world of goo. With quite a lot of physics settings, tuning them took quite a long time; about a day – which is a lot if you’re making a game in 48h.

The first iteration of the prototype for this game took a week to complete with three programmers and one artist (so 3x 40h of programming and 1x 40h of art).

A game was based on the prototype, and it will be released soon for the iPhone. More info on the game and some screenshots of the iPhone version can be found here, on the website of Crazy Monkey Studios.

I’ve done several compo’s and found a version control system to be very valuable.

For OS X users; I made a tutorial on how to set up a local SVN repository:

I’ve been using this ‘time-lapse’ tool Gawker, and I seems there are some frame rate issues…

I cleaned my desk and took a picture!

Time to go to bed now. In about six hours I’ll wake up (in the middle of the night here in Belgium; 3 AM).

Everyone interested in putting Ludum Dare participation on his or her LinkedIn account, check the Ludum Dare 19 event I just created on LinkedIn:

http://events.linkedin.com/?query=ludum+dare&commit=Search&date=any&location=anywhere&near=&category=

According to LinkedIn at the time of writing, only one person is attending! 😮

Wouldn’t it be great to see who in your network is attending, and how we are connected?

I’m planning to make a screenshot every 2-4 hours, which should result in 10-20 screenshots (at least if I’ll get some sleep over the next 48h). Some history:

• 1985: I was born
• 1986: The board game Amazing Labyrinth was published
• 1987: The game Scarab of Ra was released

Actually, Scarab of Ra was one of the first games I played, on a Macintosh SE/30 under the Apple System 7 OS.

So I’m going for a simplified combination of these two games.

Amazing Labyrinth:

Scarab or Ra (now that’s a cool monkey):

First screenshot of a randomly generated maze:

To be continued…

The sun is slowly starting to shine, and I’m here with an updated screenshot.

Still 90% of the time left and feeling confident.

As my game is near complete, I started looking for a title.

The game is a combination of Scarab of Ra and aMAZEing labyrinth, so I came up with the following combinations:

• Scarab of Mazing
• Scazing of Rabyrinth
• The Arab of Ska
• The Arab of Lara
• Maze-o-Lab
• Lab-o-Ra

Or maybe I should throw ‘Discovery’ in the mix. Feel free to let me know what you think!

Update… The camera should now be more or less final.

I’m a bit behind on schedule, as I had to make the walls flat (they’re double-sided planes now). This simplified a few things, and made better vertex lighting possible (the default plane in Unity has 100 vertices, while the default box only has 4 vertices).

I’ll still have to change the lighting, but not before I’ve done something with the materials of the walls and floors.

Next I’ll implement the sliding of the maze.

But first… pizza!

A short update this time. It’s becoming more and more interesting, so I won’t spend a lot of time writing this post.

And… I may have too many ideas on how to improve the game. I hope I can implement them all!

Change list:

• Can’t walk trough walls any more
• Added walk buttons
• Added minimap
• Added discovery percentage
• Detection if standing in front of a wall that can be moved

Five hours later, and finally the sliding works. I’m sure this will have been the feature that took the longest to implement.

I’ve also added some extra features, like a compass.

The maze is moving!

Next, the win condition, levels and score will be implemented. This should be possible in about two hours I suppose.

After that , I’ll be playing around with some different behaviors, before starting on the graphics, sound and polishing.

I just finished eating and I’m ready to continue!

Home-made bread with two varieties of cheese and two types of jam, accompanied by two mandarin oranges. S’il vous plaît!

Yum yum yum

Almost halfway in time.

The initially planned version is nearly finished (a version without proper graphics and sound, I mean), but I noticed some issues with the gameplay that I’ll resolve first:

• To make it easier, I had to allow moving the tile you’re standing on, rather only dragging walls in front of you to the left or right – which was far too limited.
• Now it’s too easy, so you actually don’t need to explore a lot (you can just stay on your tile and navigate it nearly everywhere).
• The solution:
  • Addition of  a health meter. If you move a tile, it costs more health than just moving your body to an other tile. By exploring you can find health packs to restore your health.
  • Addition of treasures. These are used to create a score. Also, the percentage the map was explored is added to the score at the end of each map. If you have explored the map for 100%, you get an extra bonus.

This shouldn’t be too much work to implement. I hope to do this now, before going to bed. Tomorrow I’ll still have at least 16 hours to create a pretty layout and some nice graphics.

No screenshot this time.

Over halfway, and I’ll finally take some time to sleep.

I’m finally at a point where I won’t change anything any more in the game play.

I still need to improve the UI and mini-map, and create some graphics and sound.

I think I’ll go for a black-and-white approach, just as in the original Scarab of Ra game, but with more detail (rather like Mad World).

If I find enough time I may make some stencil-graffiti-like images. I’m no artist though, but if I keep it stylized it could work out.

Example of a stencil graffiti:

Stencil Graffiti

Good morning Ludum Dare!

I slept for 5+ hours, and I feel better than at the beginning, when I woke up at 3 AM :). It’s 11 AM here now, what I would call a decent time to wake up!

I just noticed I forgot to make some bread yesterday evening, so I quickly put all the ingredients in the machine (to be continued):

So, to still have a quick breakfast, I baked two eggs. I hope it will be sufficient while waiting for the bread.

And… I think I have some more nice ideas for the art style. Sleeping isn’t to bad after all during a Ludum Dare…

Preparing the game to insert textures (my photo camera is charging, so I can’t take pictures for textures at the moment).

One of the textures I’m using:

Based on an actual picture of the floor here, taken today.

And in case anyone was wondering what the bread looked like after baking:

Updated graphics:

Now I’ll do some further testing, and then I’ll start working on the sound and music, which I don’t have yet…

Another nice meal I had this evening.

Credits to my girlfriend, who was away all weekend to let me concentrate on LD19. She prepared this meal when she returned this evening.