Hi all!

My name’s Camille and I’m a 3D Developer from Australia. This will be my first time doing any game comp, let alone Ludum Dare. I usually have a bit of a problem with picking ideas that are too ambitious or require a lot of commitment, so I’m unsure as to whether I’ll get a “playable” game in the time frame rather than just an intro to a longer game. In any case, I’ll be very happy to get anything to show by the end of the weekend. This weekend I hope to get at least 10 hours of work done. Going to a LAN party as well where I’ll be sitting in the corner making my game, must avoid temptation, wish me luck!

My usual tool set:

Engine: Unity

Language: C#

IDE: Visual Studio

3D: Autodesk 3ds Max

2D: Adobe Photoshop

Audio: ?? Might be simple recordings + Audacity

As much as I love the look of 2D games (pixel art in particular) I don’t have much experience in coding it, so this game will likely be 3D and first person due to the limited time available.

As mentioned in my bio, things like immersion and mood are very important to me when I create something, here are some sci-fi examples I made:

(Random 2D art I made in Photoshop with hill silhouettes traced off a photo)

(3D scene in Unity which was made by putting together some purchased terrain meshes, modified space skybox, lots of [very unoptimised] particle systems, and lighting – you can see a brief animated video here: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/63545395/Preview.mp4)

Let’s see how this goes!

Stole computer setup from work – check.
Comfy jammies – check.

I kind of wish LD started tonight – it’s 7pm over here in Western Australia, tonight is undisturbed, and I’m ready to get started. Guess I’ll have to wait

On the plus side, I now have these shiny dual 27s at home so I can conveniently watch the season finale of one of my “girly shows” on a nice big screen, before the comp begins and I feel too guilty to watch anything.

Tags: deskphoto

4 hours in and this is what I have so far… Not sure how well this will run on low end computers lol.

Getting worried about time left for gameplay but at least I’m actually making something this weekend!! *_*

I’ve been recording a timelapse too, will post up after the comp if it’s any good.

It’s done.. phewf.

My entry is now submitted, you can see it here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=11137

I pretty much didn’t have any gameplay until 12 hours in (out of the 17 I spent in total), but I finally decided on the simple idea of “collecting memories” which I actually quite like.

Here’s a look, more screenshots at the main post:

Timelapse and postmortem up in the next few days. Off to bed!

Hi all

Here’s the video timelapse for my entry The Ghosts You Left Me, which can be played here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=11137

This is not 100% complete as there were times when I stopped Chronolapse and forgot to turn it back on (and forgot to turn it off too at times), but it has most of it.

Screenshots taken every 60 seconds. Total time spent on the game 17 hours – for a more precise breakdown on what time was spent on, see the game page ^

TIMELAPSE:

Tags: timelapse

Here’s a bit of a look at how the graphics for The Ghosts You Left Me progressed.

[Timelapse video here]

1. I first worked on the cryo pod, as this was the main point of interest for both the room and overall storyline mechanic. First I gathered some reference images of various cryo pods, abandoned rooms and sci fi rooms. The cryo pods ranged in shape from very rectangular, “industrial” looking ones, to curved and slick sci-fi ones. I settled on a look between the two, with a cylindrical shape as the base and form added around it with hoses and random-shapes-that-would-theoretically-do-fancy-medical-stuff. It took a good while to come up with the initial door shape in 3ds Max, I basically started all over twice after not liking what I came up with. Finally it started to take shape, and I played around with some bits of infrastructure around it – namely, the walkway. After a little bit of playing around I decided I liked the thought of the entire walkway floating in a large, tall room. I duplicated numerous cryo pods around and thought it made the room look much more interesting, rather than having just one. The room started to take shape just from trial and error and after about three hours or so I ended up with the mesh ready to import into Unity.

2. Now the mesh… into Unity… fairly straightforward. Here’s how it looked on initial import with nothing changed. Some incorrectly flipped normals here zzz!

3. I then went and added materials to all the objects. Seeing as I was limited on time, none of my models were going to be unwrapped, and I instead used simple diffuse/specular materials and relied on the lighting and particle effects to make them look nice. In the end these simple materials were actually enough to give the atmosphere that I wanted. Textures would ONLY have worked if they were done well, and in the time frame available that’s not really possible for me at my current levels; I think sub-par or standard textures would have actually detracted from the overall aesthetic. Either do it simply, or do it well – is my usual motto.

4. I then briefly played around with some lighting – this is just using a standard directional light. The light coming in from the ceiling windows looked quite nice. It started to look quite dark (P.S. On the Ludum Dare blog it’ll look wayyy darker due to the white background around it… but full screen it’s not as bad)… but I thought this felt more natural somehow. It was an abandoned, empty room essentially. You had to feel alone, and it felt more realistic to have a minimal light source. At this stage it was starting to come together however it didn’t feel quite right yet, until…

5. I started baking the lightmaps. This made the scene a lot more natural, in my opinion, as the previous lighting had all kinds of specular reflections which wouldn’t be there in real lighting. Now I’m actually quite a noob at this and it took a good few attempts at baking (slow zzz) until I got something I was okay with. Unfortunately I still don’t know how to get the lightmaps to be higher quality, as there is a lot of banding and low resolution artifacts in the final lightmapped scene which is quite noticeable. Still got a lot to learn. Anyway, the effect of the overall final scene was a combination of this lightmapping process in addition to some particle systems I added to give the room some dynamism and a bit more mood, instead of being completely static.

With regards to performance, this scene was actually not as bad as I thought it would end up (based on the naked eye, I did not run profiler or FPS tests) and webplayer compression did such a treat on the large lightmap sizes; however in a real deployment where I have more time I would definitely try to optimise things like the particle systems and the lightmap resolutions. The meshes themselves weren’t too bad with their poly counts and the room is quite minimal, but the objects could probably still be joined and batched.

Et voilà! There’s one I prepared earlier!

Hopefully this was interesting to some of you. I will be posting up more postmortems on the other aspects of development in the coming days.

– Camille

Tags: postmortem

One of the things that I love about these events is that you learn so much, even more so from your failures than your successes.

Here are some notes from making my entry The Ghosts You Left Me.

What went well:

• I managed to achieve my goals of good mood, visuals and immersion
• No problems with deployment or submission
• When I was working on the game, none of the time was wasted. My work rate was fairly normal. It wasn’t too rushed, until the end, but it was solid production.
• I had a lot of fun making things from scratch – particularly the audio. You don’t really give much thought to this when you make something normally, using external sources. Grab a texture from CGTextures, grab some audio from Freesound, etc. Making it yourself is an entirely different process and it’s so much more exciting! I had to wander around my house, listening to noises, moving things and scraping things to see if they could produce the noises I was looking for. It was so much fun, and so much more real. Creating things from scratch makes you gain a new level of respect for things that you’d otherwise take for granted.
• I was incredibly happy to have created something, ANYTHING. It’s sometimes hard to push myself to work on personal projects, but when I do make something I’m usually quite proud of “levelling up” that small amount more.

What went badly:

• I should have gotten feedback earlier. The first person to play my game was my brother, who I showed it to just after I had submitted it. Watching someone play your game very quickly allows you to see its downfalls. He couldn’t understand the message audio clearly, and didn’t realise he had to click on Locker 3. To be fair though I didn’t have much gameplay to test until near the end, but I definitely need to get someone to play it BEFORE I submit, next time
• Computer crashed twice and lost a bit of progress… something might have got messed around when I installed a wireless adapter… not a huge issue
• Started to lose motivation after ~6 hours or so. There was a LAN party going on and I wanted to go, so after a bit of stalling I did go. I think it was more that I wanted some social interaction during that weekend, I felt like such a reclusive hermit staying at home. Because I didn’t really have much to show at that point besides some models, I didn’t feel like I had achieved much yet so it almost made it feel like if I continued that the entire weekend, it would be a waste of a weekend. I needed to get out.
• Didn’t give much thought to gameplay until about 10-12 hours in out of the 17 total, so it ended up being very simple (which I expected going in)

Playing the entries/ratings:

• I am absolutely inspired by the amount of talent here, and the quality and originality of some entries – makes me want to try a lot harder next time!
• It’s really exciting to get feedback on my entry. What I’ve received so far is generally very positive and there’s some constructive feedback as well which I agree with. I find myself checking my entry page numerous times a day to look for new comments (notifications system plis!).

Why I liked Ludum Dare:

• I needed the deadline that Ludum Dare imposed. I hate pressure, but I’m one of the people who need it in order to get anything done, otherwise I’m too “cruisey” with doing things.
• I also was motivated by the competition and the excitement of other people around the world doing it at the same time
• Getting feedback from fellow developers can be so different from getting feedback from others who have less or no experience in game development. They are both very capable of giving feedback regarding what they see, the content, what is bad and what could be better. They can both be impressed, or disappointed. But the difference is that one has a better understanding and appreciation what goes into making it, and how difficult it is to create something under such a short time frame. It’s much the same in different aspects of life really. I value feedback from both groups very much, but it’s very refreshing to get feedback from people who *know*.

Next Ludum Dare:

• I am DEFINITELY going to enter if I’m free that weekend
• Focus on more of a balance of nice aesthetics and gameplay, as the gameplay was lacking in my first entry
• I’d like to try and get more innovative gameplay rather than something that everyone’s already seen
• A bit more of a plan up-front, and maybe schedule my estimated time allocations
• Actually think more about the theme when it’s announced or in final voting stages, instead of thinking of an idea beforehand and then trying to fit in with the theme – the most innovative entries I’ve seen are ones which have a lot to do with the theme and creatively used it
• I’ll probably still do it solo, and alone, but I think taking a 1-2 hour break every 5 hours or so is important to keep my motivation levels up
• Get people to play it BEFORE I submit

Next steps for my entry?
I would ideally like to continue it. As I mentioned and many people agreed with, it was just an intro to a longer game, and wasn’t really a full game in itself. There’s so much more that could be done, and so much more that I want to do with it. I guess we’ll have to see how it goes with the motivation and setting aside time for it

And that’s all for now! Very excited for the next LD, and also excited to see the results of this one. Well done to everyone who put in a submission and best of luck.

Tags: postmortem

I was bored today, and seeing as there’s talk about re-doing the website I thought I’d try a quick redesign – mostly just different skin, similar layout for the most part. I added on a scrollable bar of random game thumbnails at the top. Would love to have a forum too. Click for full size:

Notifications would be nice:

This colour scheme looks oddly similar to my game’s, lol.

(Hopefully) entering for a second time, although I’m having trouble thinking of games to make with the current themes. I’ve got a few ideas for a few however thinking of the gameplay is proving tricky as usual. Story and mood is more my forte.
 

I could go 3D as usual, or perhaps try 2D this time. I guess it will depend on the theme and what I’m doing. But my toolset will likely be:
 

3D: 3ds Max
2D: Photoshop
Engine: Unity
Language: C# in Visual Studio
Audio: Audacity
 

We still have no internet in our new apartment, eek, so going to have to go to work to upload the entry.
 

Here’s me battlestation:

Food not included. Adorable puppy included.
 

Let’s be bad guys!

RELIC is now available to play HERE.

RELIC is now available to play HERE.

 

Am I being replaced?

You can follow the progress of the post-LD version of RELIC on Facebook or Twitter.

The results are in, and I’m super happy! The overall ranking was a lot better than I had hoped for:

#38 Overall 3.98 #54 Graphics 4.13 #74 Innovation 3.90 #113 Fun 3.69 #184 Humor 3.02 #303 Mood 3.16 #355 Audio 2.94 #681 Theme 3.02

All the other categories were roughly in the order that I expected. In my last couple of entries I scored a bit better in things like Humor, Mood and Graphics, but I think the Overall score for this one meant it was a more well-rounded game.

Very appreciative of all the people who played and rated Panzerantix, thanks again!

Looking forward to checking out the top placing games now – they look great.

 

You can check out Panzerantix here!