I’m in, third this year. Think this is my favourite theme of 2013, looking forward to seeing what others do with it.

Dialogue system in place, sort of rough idea of how you’ll click to interact also sort of working. Now for sleep. Ahh.

Gonna be right down to the wire… but my 2D puzzle thriller will be done soon.

I thought a lot of people might do, “you only get one bullet”, but I figured I’d be one of the only ones where you can actually use that bullet on yourself if you want…

Graphics

I am not a pixel artist, but I love the gritty look and feel of Hot Line Miami. Unfortunately, taking the time to try and kludge together a bunch of pixel graphics just wasn’t in the cards for this compo. So what did I do instead? I faked it. Yes indeed, I’ve always done all my art in Flash, which means I end up with nice vector art that I could use at any resolution. Take a look at what everything actually looked like as I drew it in Flash:

Seriously, right click and open in new tab to see this in high resolution, no visible pixels.

 And so, to get that gritty pixel feel without actually making pixel art, there’s a post process effect on the camera to down res everything. Simply take whatever’s being rendered and blit it to a buffer that is a fraction of the width and height (I used 200 for the height, and 200 * aspect ratio for the width). I was really happy with how this turned out.

 Lighting

Lighting is achieved by having a camera render only the lighting, and another layer render only the main scene. The Lighting layer gets blended with the scene layer with a simple multiply shader. That last step requires Unity Pro to use render textures, luckily I’ve got a pro license! If you then take radial patterns with some colour and put them in the lighting layer, presto! you’ve got lights. What’s even cooler is that you take Unity’s particle system and tell them to render on the lighting camera, I only used this on the phone to get a sort of moving glowing blue hovering over it, but it’s really quite cool

I also used a small library for doing the 2D volumetric mesh lighting. I could have used it more heavily to have lots of really cool dynamic shadows, but being that this is a pre-built library, I didn’t want to use it’s functionality a lot. I guess it would be like using any of the other stuff built in or available for use in Unity, but no one wants to see a game that only looks good because it’s chock full of pre assembled visual fx. Regardless, I owe a shout out to RXI and his entry to LD27. He described his lighting technique on a reddit thread last Ludum Dare. I was disappointed to learn I would need Unity pro to achieve it, but honestly as soon as I got a pro copy, recreating the lighting in Solitude was the first thing I tried.

Sound

The game has 11 sound effects total and a single music track (that only plays when you trigger certain intense events that need scary music!). About half of the sounds are some combination of drums in fruity loops that are then distorted. Example: the gunshot sound is actually just a snare hit and a bass drum with lots of reverb and distortion! The other half of the sounds are bfxr sounds, again, distorted, usually just a high-pass filter and some reverb. Oh and the door unlock sound was a mouth sound effect! I probably spent 10 minutes clicking my tongue to get that to sound juuuussttt right, heheh. The telephone was 2 tones on an arpeggiator, then a duplicate of those tones shifted and octave, then reverb! That came out really nicely, especially when coupled with the sweet 3D sound provided by Unity.

The single music track is really nothing special, I just chose a really bass-ey synth and two chords with an arpeggiator. If you get to a stage in the game where you actually hear that music, you’re on the right track to solving the puzzle!

Ring ring ring ring ring! (this is also an example of particle effects as 2D lights!)

Gameplay and Theme

Last but certainly not least. I have to say, I loved this theme. I read it and immediately had a hundred different ideas. Nothing like 10 Seconds, where I spent like 5 hours only to land on an idea I didn’t even like. I was really drawn to the idea of only one bullet. Originally the game plan was to have you and your captor be playing Russian roulette but I couldn’t figure out a way to get any gameplay in. It would have been 100% narrative and art driven, which is interesting, but not what I wanted to do. I decided on this sort of mash up of adventure game/top down shooter thing. I’ll let you be the judge and tell me if it worked out, but I was really pretty happy with it!

So the core puzzle… The idea is this: you awake in the room, there’s a gun on the table, and evidence that you had maybe written a suicide letter. This is why you can shoot yourself. If you are really convinced this is a game about a man’s suicide, and all you can do is die, then so be it! Though if you care to explore further, there’s a bit more to it. Spoilers ahead; if you want to solve the game on your own don’t read any further! You are locked in. If you experience any of the endings where the phone rings and you are shot through the window, you know you’re being watched. The watcher wants you to take your own life, but he won’t hesitate to kill you if  you waste the only bullet. If you shut off the light in the room and then waste the bullet, the killer still calls you… but when you don’t answer, well then he needs to clear the room to see if that gun shot he heard killed you. Of course when he enters the room and finds you alive, he kills you.

The objective then becomes tricking the killer into thinking you’ve fired the gun, when really you’ve saved that only bullet for him! Okay, spoilers again, one last chance to go try and beat it on your own! The key you find in the coat unlocks that bathroom door in the northwest corner of the room. Inside the bathroom is an aerosol can that reads “Explosive when heated”. The kitchen has a stove you can turn on, and blowing up an aerosol can sounds a lot like a gunshot…

Wrapping Up

Well that does it for this post mortem! If you’ve read this far, kudos! Hope everyone had fun this time around, I know I did. Looking forward to playing some more games and checking out what everyone else cooked up for You Only Get One!

Some progress, art stuffs, character line of sight view, animation, camera control. Good stuff!

Hey all! It’s been a long time (over 2 years!) since my last solo 48 hour compo, but this weekend, I am going all in! Really excited for this. I have the whole weekend open and I’ve been actively working on games for the last while so I shouldn’t be too rusty. I’m planning on doing some streaming over the weekend, and probably will be producing a time lapse video which I’ll share here.

Good luck to all! Can’t wait to quickly make video games with you!

Cheers,
@DanielJMoran

PS: I make videos about shaders and particles and stuff. I’ve released quite a few shaders and particle effects you can use in your games if you’re also developing in Unity3D, some of them look like this:

Particles GIF

You can get these resources here: Assets

And check out the related videos here: My YouTube Channel!

Wow I underestimated how difficult it was to produce a 10 minute video from 33+ hours and 150GB of video files! Can you believe most video editing software doesn’t allow you to speed things up by 20000%?! What a bunch of BS. Anyway… after many difficulties, I have compressed my entire weekend into a nice little video!

Check out the game’s submission page and give it go here:  http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-35/?action=preview&uid=22132

Hey all! I did some small bug fixes (audio sync issues and unfair deaths as the fish and bird form) as well as greatly increased usability by adding various control schemes based on user feedback. You can now use numeric input to switch forms, arrow keys, and several new options for the primary action button. There is also a small animal wheel that shows the currently active form and visualizes which form you’ll shapeshift into by pressing left vs right!

If you want the true vanilla experience that reflects the source code and compo entry, the original link is still there. But most of these changes were incredibly small and just make the game more accessible because much of the game’s difficulty was caused by awkward controls instead of genuine challenge!

View the entry page and play Lux Anima!

Cheers,
Broxxar

Hey I did well in a few categories! Not too shabby, definitely happy to have made top 100 over all, and placing top 20 in a few categories was really cool, especially 10th on Theme! Awesome.

I think my obtuse control scheme held me back a bit. Definitely going to have a friend do a sanity check of my controls in future LD’s! The bar for my future compo’s has definitely been raised though. Can’t wait for Ludum Dare 36 for another chance to hopefully earn myself some of those shiny top 3 medals!

Thanks to all who hung out on stream with me throughout the weekend. Streaming made the whole thing a lot more fun and involved and I’ll definitely be doing it in future LD’s.

You can play the post-compo version of Lux Anima on itch.io!