Chillsters are joining the ludum dare!

Not long till the theme is announced, and we are sat in the studio getting ready!

In the meantime please check our IndieDB site:
http://www.indiedb.com/members/chillsters

We have come to chill and chew gum, and we’re all out of gum!

You only have one chance to memorise the map, then darkness sets in and you must manouvre around a pitch black room using “key lights” on the walls as reference.

The game hosts some varied tile types, non lethal obstacles, lethal obstacles, crawl and jump spaces, and generates the maps at run time. We also have a unique lighting system that denies the player the ability to cheat by print screening the play space!

Is your memory good enough??

Will hopefully post a gameplay video tonight!

If you are interested in the game, or our studio, please visit www.facebook.com/chillsters and follow us for updates on our future game devs

#chill

We are getting there! Still 24 Hours left so not too stressed atm, done audio, player controller, obstacle generation and started on the menu and UI, models are imported and now being merged with the level generation code, then we should be playing it before the end of the night 😀

#justchilling

We finished a nice little prototype for sonar vision, and generating puzzles that you must travel through in the dark.

You only get once chance to memorise the grid 😀

Hope everyone enjoyed themselves, cant wait to play your games! For now, gta and sleep!

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-28/?action=preview&uid=30357

This is a very late post-mortem for our game. This was our first game jam together and my personal first too. In fact only one of four of us had done a game jam before. It took us the best part of a day to come up with the idea. We’ve explained it before but will do so again here for completeness. It’s basically a 3D first-person memory game where you only have one chance to view the maze and then it’s lights out. You start in the yellow area and in this area you can “view” the maze via a pulse beacon. You can also zoom the camera out and look around from a top down view to get a better idea too. Then as soon as you leave this starting location the beacon goes out and you have to make your way to the green finish in the dark. All this while avoiding various obstacles and traps.

Pros:

• The 3D first-person nature of the game made it quite unique for a game jam in this time frame. We honestly thought we weren’t going to finish at one point.
• The pulse beacon meant that people couldn’t just screenshot the maze and be done with it.
• The music and sounds add a lot of atmosphere and even gameplay to the game.
• We discovered we could work very effectively as a whole team as we did so during this.
• The balance in difficulty is quite good for beginners and experts.
• We even got in a tutorial which explains it really good.
• Voice acting really added to the game, even though it was totally dodgy.
• The beacon shows proof of concept for a future project 😉

Cons:

• We did spent a lot of time sleeping and messing about doing other stuff. Then stressed when it got to crunch time.
• We had to rush a couple things as we seriously thought we weren’t going to finish it at one point.
• Lack of foresight meant people could just run around the edge of the maze resulting in the excessive collisions.
• Being a working company we literally had no time afterwards to play, comment or rate on other games.
• Could have maybe been better to work the tutorial into the gameplay directly?
• If we had more time we’d make the generation algorithm more sturdy.
• Bigger levels? More levels? Joining levels?
• We wish we’d made it like The Cube (film) now.

It was a shame that after the effort we put in we didn’t have time to give other people’s efforts a go. I’m sure we’ll get around to playing a few of them eventually. But it still sucks to know there’s no way we can possibly come anywhere close to winning because of this.

Either way we definitely had fun and will be back for the next one for sure! We just hope we’ll have more time available after to do it properly.