Heya! My team and I haven't done a Ludum Dare since #47, back in October of '20, so we decided to get back into things. We've been busy with work but we've opened up our schedule because was always enjoy this.
We'll be streaming our progress, as usual, on our Twitch channel (https://www.twitch.tv/aaghgames), so feel free to stop by and say hello if you're not busy.
Like so many others, I made a wallpaper to use during the stream:
Good luck to everyone, and have fun!
After a lot of brainstorming and a few failed 3D models, I'm finally taking a break on day one. My team and I have our concept ready, but I wanted to devote extra time to the visuals this go around, so that was my day today. Tomorrow, the rest of the coding!
Our game's coming along well. The character models are done - those are always my hardest part - and as you can see, the soul harvest is yielding a bumper crop this year.
Here are some glamor* shots of the character models.
* That term has never been used more loosely lmao
The scenery in our game is finally rounding into shape! In this anachronistic city, our hero kills innocent people.
Some hero.
We have a logo, we have a game name, and we have an almost completed game. Just another few hours to get the last of the levels in, and we'll be good to go. This is definitely one of the smoothest Ludum Dares we've participated in. I'm still waiting for that last minute snag that almost undoes the entire project. lol
We've gone from this:
to this:
in 48 hours. The mechanics are largely done. The modelling is largely done. The animations are done, save for one. The main menu? Done. Likewise the music, with only some sound effects left to do. Now I just need to assemble the last levels - which are already written out - and we're good to go.
The finish line is in sight - now to run through the tape.
We finished and posted our game at exactly 3 PM EDT - not a moment too soon.
"Soul Property: Who's Life is it Anyway?" is our entry. As a soul-harvesting reaper, you collect souls to pay off a debt on your mansion (you are, after all, the Griminator, the very best soul stealer in the business)
Across five short levels, try to collect enough souls to clear your debt.
So, I was looking at the animation tree for our game, Soul Property: Who's Life is it Anyway? (play it here!) and saw that said animation tree had been organized into an... interesting pattern.
I remember spreading them out so I could better visualize the connections and transitions, but I didn't notice until we were done that I had accidentally turned it into a pentagram. Hopefully that's not a bad omen. 😅
Heya, everyone! Today I wanted to share some stories from the creation of our entry, Soul Property: Who's Life is it Anyway?. If you haven't tried it yet, now's a great time to do so! Either way, let's get to the story at hand.
This was our original concept sketch. Seriously, this is all the visual notes we took before we got to work. Because we went with such a straight-forward premise, there wasn't a lot to jot down. You can see the player character on the left (The Griminator!), as well as a few simple platforms. The B, P, and S were to indicate the three types of baddies you'd encounter - evil people, neutral people, and good people (meaning Baddie, Person and Saint). We opted to have the evil people give up the least number of souls, while the good people would give up the most.
These are our people. However, they weren't our original design. I actually started with a rotund dude, who looked a little like this (from our livestream):
But, I screwed up and ruined the model beyond repair so I had to start again from scratch, creating the trio you see above.
Level design early on was stupid-simple, as it should be. Since we were using colored capsules as filler until we got the models done, the player script got named PillPlayer. The human script became SoulPerson, because as far as the game was concerned, they existed solely as soul sources.
In this image from our livestream, I'd asked the game's co-developer @Floata3 to send me a scythe reference image to work from, and this was one of the ones he sent me. I concurred with him that it was badass, but it was a little beyond what I was going to be able to churn out in a reasonable amount of time.
Once I got the reference picture I needed, I used it to refine and sculpt the handle of the weapon. I took a few liberties with the blade, but this helped shape our scythe's proportions.
The level designs, pre-art, were really garish and hard on the eyes. The cubes on either side of the people on the map were nav aids - when an enemy hit one, they turned around 180 after a short delay and proceeded to the next one. The large cube on the side of the screen was the trigger for the next level.
I had fun making the fighting animations for our baddies. I wanted the attacks to look somewhat goofy and half-assed, like they weren't any good at fighting but weren't going to go down peacefully. The Bad person just two-fist shoving the player was my favorite one.
This was damn near our undoing - me spending over an hour on the pre-game text scroll. I kept tweaking it and refining it, but it could have been simplified and the time lost actually resulted in us having to cut over level count by over 50%. I've had people tell me that the scroll was too fast, but I was concerned that if it was too long, no one was going to sit through it long enough to read it. As it is, they simply can't read it because it's too fast. We would have been better off if I had just gone ahead made it slower, it turns out.
In the end, we're still pleased with how it turned out. @Floata3 nailed the music tracks, I mumbled into a mic to give our characters some lines, and we got it turned in right at the deadline.
The results are in, and we did okay! As always, humor was our strongest category while we lagged in innovation. An overall average of 3.12 suggests an overall positive response. We appreciated all of the feedback we received on Soul Property, as well. Thanks again to everyone who rated our game!
AAGH Games is back for Ludum Dare 56, after our most recent entry in LD52 back in January of last year. As usual, we'll be livestreaming our progress on Twitch throughout the weekend:
https://www.twitch.tv/aaghgames.
I'm in charge of the programming and graphics, while @floata3 handles level/map design and the music. Good luck to everyone, and we're looking forward to seeing what everyone makes!!
One day in, and we're soaring high, like a fly. Our crappy game is fly-centric, and while the gameplay is largely done, the graphics are still a work in progress:
That didn't stop me from taking a 'glamour' shot of our star character, though!
Our game is coming along well so far! Sometimes our little fly character flies a little too close to the stove, though.
Finally, we've completed our game! It's up for rating/reviewing now, so if you would, give it a grade!
In Duke Flywalker's Crap-tastic Adventure, our little hero went through a handful of looks before arriving at his final form.
Originally a cartoony fly, this design was tossed because it was too simple looking, and also because it looked a lot more like a spider than a fly.
This was the redesign, with more fly-like proportions and less googly eyes. Unfortunately, I - the art was my responsibility - messed it up along the way and had to start again.
Here's the final design that found its way into the game. With a less tubular form, faceted eyes, and the addition of a probiscis, we were finally satisfied with this final fly form.
This is same as the in-game version, just with a fur coat and faceted wings, and used only in the menus or promotional posts.
If you haven't played/rated it, please do so here - it would make Duke a happy little fly.
Join us and we'll rate your game on Stream! https://www.twitch.tv/aaghgames
Heya, everyone! I want to take a moment here and do a retrospective on the development of our Ludum Dare 56 entry, Duke Flywalker's Crap-tastic Adventure.
The first day began with us getting the theme and brainstorming ideas, mostly about did and did not constitute a "tiny creature". After removing joke ideas like Pikmin and Smurfs, our idea board looked something like this:
Admittedly, not the most innovative of lists, but it got us started on the road to creativity. Our idea ended up involving a fly collecting piles of poo and taking them home to his family. Originally there was going to be a spider as the villain but that got cut for time reasons. Here's our initial map concept diagram.
Once the jump ability was axed (As @floata3 said to me when I was struggling getting the jump to work, "Flies don't jump, Bud!"), we opted instead for the ability to glide. The fly had its wings damaged (a throwback to an anecdote of my cousin once turning a fly into a walk by taking its wings off - true story, sadly) so it couldn't fly very well, and we also decided to lean into the 'tiny' part by making the poo piles too heavy to easily climb and glide with, as they weighed the fly down.
By the end of our livestream on day one, I had made the fly's 3D model twice and made the poo pile model. Before I went to bed that night I remade the fly model one last time to the one currently in the game.
Day two began with us finally making the actual levels. I insisted on making the first two as instructional tutorial levels and left the rest up to @floata3. We drew our maps on index cards to keep them simple and compact:
We spent most of day two on that, laying out the levels using simple cubes. I opted for a barn thing for the end goal instead of a house, nest or flag, because honestly, the chance to combine "fly" and "barn door" was just too tempting. Here's a look at what the levels looked like in the editor:
Once done, we wrapped the day's stream and I got to work modelling the levels in 3D. I opted to, rather than my usual piece-by-piece approach - to model each level as one 3D object. This began by taking a screenshot of the level from the editor:
Taking that reference image into Blender and scaling it so I could work from it and modeling the level as one monolithic mesh. The resulting mesh looked a little something like this:
Finally, with the modeling done, it was time to texture the thing. Opting for a simplistic look for the level geometry (with most detail spent of props scattered around each level), the finished product looked like this:
The only place I went a bit overboard on my design was the back wall, where I opted for a three-dimensional pattern that is completely lost in the flat 2D view.
Day two closed with the levels done, the graphics pretty much complete, and the music from @floata3 worked into the game. All that was left was the sound effects.
The third day dawned with sound effects as the goal. As I hemmed and hawed about how to make the fly's flying noise, it dawned on me that I have something that buzzes - an electric razor. I recorded that and pitched it up for the fly, and then used a more heavily modified version for the buzz saws, as well. (btw, do you get it? Flies buzz? Buzz saws??) All of the other sound effects were made from other nearby items like pop bottles and some vocalizations. Unfortunately I recorded many of the sounds too quiet, and attempts to ratchet them up distorted them to an unpleasant degree, so they got left as they were.
All told, we finished and submitted our entry with an hour or two to spare. We're happy with what we made, but what about you? Have you rated our Crap-tastic Aventure yet? If not, now would be a great time to do so!
In what will be our 17th Ludum Dare (starting with Ludum Dare 30 in 2014), my team and I are looking forward to another good jam with everyone!
I'm not feeling super creative with my theme suggestions this time, so I went with some spacial ones.
If only to see what this community would do with it. 😆
Just a quick question: when streaming for game jams or just Ludum Dare on Twitch, what category do you use? I usually use the 'LudumDare' tag, but is there a common category that people usually use, or do you leave that blank? The past few times I've just left the category blank, but I figured I'd ask around and see if there was a better option.