Something about missing 100% of the shots you don’t take…

Really looking forward to this.

How I feel right now.

My setup.

I think the catch will be that while you can pick up same coloured objects with your mouse, you won’t collide with them. That would prevent you from turning red, hopping on a red square and flying through the levels.

Presumably you’ll be able to dump your current colour into some other object. Hmm…

Currently a simple platformer is working and objects can have colour that the player can “absorb” leaving the colour with whatever colour the player had and the player gaining the object’s colour. It’s a nice smooth transition between the two, meaning if I click that blue block while I’m red, at one point both the player and the block will be purple at the midpoint of the transition.

My core game mechanic of absorbing an objects colour and gaining the ability to manipulate objects of the same colour is implemented.

Check it out here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3eFCY74aL4&feature=youtu.be

Now the plan is to play around with this a bit and implement interactions other than simply free dragging including but not limited to: dragging with axis restrictions, rotation, destroying?

Then I’ll get into a bit of level creation/start working on whatever art assets I’ll need (while still keeping things of a minimalistic nature).

It’s 7am for me and I’ve been up since 2pm yesterday… Anyway, I changed my mind on what I wanted to do next, took a break from code to rig and animate my character:

The animation for when he absorbs a colour makes it so much more satisfying…

Back to code though, a little camera work is necessary. In the spirit of the competition, I’ll reveal that I am using a very short bit (basically 5 lines) of pre written code for smooth 2D camera following. If you happen to see this and and go, “hey I’m writing and C#/Unity and I could use something like that!” here it is:

FollowCharacter.cs

Though it will likely need some tweaking, used a couple of magic numbers in there…

Basically everything I need is working now, camera scripts, smooth scene transitions on trigger with goal, a pretty decent handling platformer, and of course, my colour changing mechanic. Not to mention the majority of the art is fleshed out and looking pretty good.

Not bad for the first 12 hours, tomorrow, level building, sound, music, and maybe some more ambition to do something spectacular.

But now, sleep.

Play Proxy’s Demo!

WASD controls, Space jump, mouse to absorb colour.

As we approach the 24 hour mark, I’m feeling great about the state of Proxy. Try out the first 10 levels of the game and tell me what you think in the comments below.

Still to implement:

• Music & Sound
• Title Screen & Level Select
• Counter of how many you’ve proxied in a level versus the optimal count
• Time trial mode (can you say speedrun?)
• Dozens more levels!

As the competition nears end, I figured I’d put out a video playthrough of my game for anyone who either couldn’t play it or wasn’t able to complete it (I never made it round to adding saves/checkpoints so you had to play it all in one sitting to see the ending).

If you want to play Proxy, Click Here

Always appreciate more feedback and ratings. Hopefully I’ll get to do something with this project in the future, fix any bugs and expand it into the game I originally envisioned.

Cheers,

Dan

As my first LD, I wasn’t expecting much, and with so so so many entries I’m glad to have finished at least in the top 10%.

Check out Proxy here:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=22132

I must add that I am a bit disappointed to see the ratings look a bit wonky. As an example, I’ve seen some games that are little more than moving a square with the arrows keys in the top 100 of innovation. Don’t get me wrong, simplicity can be fun, such games can still look polished and make for an overall great game experience, but perhaps innovation should not be where they’re scoring highest.

I also saw a user share an anecdote about his game being bested on graphics by a text adventure.

Nevertheless, the overall top 100 certainly look like entries that deserved to be there. Congratulations to the winners, and all the best to all the game devs that took part, and good luck to anyone who will be continuing there game post compo!

Cheers,

Dan M.

This passed April, I participated in the 26th LD48 Compo. Like many others, I made a game from scratch in just 48 hours. I’ve always been someone who had to say “oh well I’m working on something big” or “I’ve got some stuff but nothing concrete just yet”. Ludum Dare was really awesome, and I was happy with the game I made. More importantly, it gave me the motivation I needed to see something through.

Now, a little more than a month later, a friend and I have taken a concept game I had before Ludum Dare, fully developed it and put it out for the world to play.

Our first game as 2DMGames, “Grav”, is now out on both Google Play and the AppStore.

Promtional Trailer

So thank you Ludum Dare community. I will be here for many more Jams and Compos to come, and give back in anyway to the community that gave me the push I needed to pursue my passion.

Keep up with us on our Facebook page, and maybe share us out to your friends if you want to support our virality.

Cheers,

Dan Moran

Weekend will be a bit of a mess. Not sure how much time I’ll have. I think I’ll stick to compo rules, but if I feel like I need more time, I’ll submit for the Jam instead and take an extra day.

I’ll be making my game using:

Engine: Unity (Indie)

Art Assets: Flash & Photoshop, Uni2D (for animation)

Music & Sounds: FL Studios Mobile

Had fun during last LD, looking forward to trying again.

Time to get cracking. Putting on this album while I go through some more ideation and sketch out some things in Flash. Let’s make a game.

The game is about rules. On the surface, it will be a simple platformmer. Every ten seconds, a rule will be enforced out of a random set of rules.

The possible rules are as follows:

One must only double jump with a single heart remaining. (Lose one heart if you double jump, unless you have only one heart left)
One must not walk backwards. (Lose one heart when you move backwards while grounded)
One must avoid flowers. (Lose one heart when you walk on flowers)
One must not see one’s own hearts. (Can’t see your own health)
One must always run. (No longer double tap to start running, player always runs)
One must not harm trolls. (Lose one heart when you jump on trolls)
One must not look up on the hourglass. (Can’t see the counter until the next debuff)
One must not pickup hearts. (Hearts become -1 heart)
One must watch for falling stars. (Stars begin to fall from the sky for the remainder of the run)
One must not stray too far. (A moving circle appears, play must stay within circle or takes 1 heart of damage)

and finally…

One must reach the castle. (Only appears after the other debuffs have been activated, player has ten seconds to reach the castle before instant death)

I think the castle door may be closed until 100 seconds has passed, and you’ll be forced to wait for it to open while still obeying rules/dodging stars and staying alive.

Then if I have time, the boss fight will be 100 seconds of avoiding boss attacks while still obeying the rules, but every ten seconds a debuff will be REMOVED, and will fire at the boss as some kind of spell.

Sound good? Okay let’s go.

Basic tile art done, putting it to use in the game.

It’s level building time.

My game, “Play Time’s Over”, is a fun & fancy platform adventure. As our hero ventures on, a new rule is introduced every 10 seconds to make play time a bit more challenging. Just doing level design and need to program a few more rules then I’m set.

Life gets in the way of pressing your eyes to the computer screen sometimes! I’m widly proud of what I got done with very little time, but unfortunately I haven’t got the last few hours of the compo to keep working as I have other commitments! Fear not, Play Time’s Over will find it’s way on to Ludum Dare as a Jam entry, so that I can use Monday to finish up.

Cheers,

Dan

Play Time’s Over is your basic run of the mill platform game, but of course, with a twist. My use of the theme acts the primary mechanic. Initially the player has 5 hearts and they can run and jump, squash trolls and bust open blocks for extra hearts. Every ten seconds, a timer goes off and a new rule is introduced to make things a bit more challenging. When a player breaks a rule, they lose a heart, plain and simple.

It turned out to be a lot fun to build the level around the rules. The main challenge was that the player gets the rules applied in a random order, so I don’t always know which rules they’d have applied to them at any given point. Overall I’m extremely happy with the way this turned out, but of course nothing’s perfect.

What went right:

• I made some great Art
  • From the moment I drew the child hero, I knew things were going to look good. I recently picked up a new tool for animation: Uni2D. It was a great for bone based animations.
• I used a Tile Editor
  • Unitile, a powerful little asset for Unity, proved to be a fantastic tile editor. I could’ve done a lot more with it if I had used prior to the Jam, but I still got a lot out of it.
• I got feedback halfway through
  • I demo’d my game part way through to some friends. I got helpful feedback that resulted in the creation of the Icons that flash red and shake when you break a rule.

What went wrong:

• I bit off more than I could chew
  • This is such an easy mistake to make. The scope of the game when you first come up with idea is always too broad. Sure you might have time to make that game, but will you have time for polish, menus, bugs?
• I made a platformer
  • D’OH! I really didn’t want to do another platform game (I made a physics puzzle platformer for LD26). It took me about 3 hours before I had an idea I was happy with, and platformer seemed the best way to execute it.
• I had a bad polish to content ratio
  • I’m really happy with how nice things look and feel, but dissatisfied with the lack of content. I wish I had maybe scrapped trolls and the rule for them to make more levels.

If you haven’t played “Play Time’s Over” yet, Click here to play!

That about does it, thank you all for reading. Looking forward to making and playing more games at LD28!

Cheers,

Dan

Working on a post compo project? Or maybe just something entirely new?

Get involved with screen shot Saturday on Reddit and on Twitter!

Check out mine for this week:

Tags: screenshotsaturday

Lighting, movement, camera panning all done. Next up is dialogue system, and uhhh, stuff to interact with, things you’ll only get one of.

I’m tired.