About

You control a ship in the space. The only way to move around is to shoot. But shooting also depletes your energy so you have to take careful and precise shots. Your energy is limited and the only way to replenish it is to kill enemies. Survive as long as you can.

Links

• https://github.com/chuckeles/cannon-ships
• itch.io/cannon-ships
• https://www.twitch.tv/videos/162813881
• https://www.twitch.tv/videos/163072353

Behind the Scenes

Hey guys! So for this Ludum Dare, I wanted to stream the development process for the first time. I also wanted to finish a game so I knew I had to keep things super simple. Focus on the mechanics and polishing the game. I also wanted to try to make a game mainly using visual scripting. For this I used 2 Unity3D plugins – FlowCanvas and NodeCanvas. Besides Unity3D I used Aseprite, Rider for C#, Bfxr, and OBS for streaming. I had fun... mostly.

In the end, I was working too slow. For one, OBS was eating 2 CPU cores for the whole time so my computer was super laggy. For two, I discovered that using visual scripting for everything is pretty limitting. I'm a lot faster in C#. On the other hand, visual scripting was amazing for the AI behavior tree and small scripts like quitting the game when ESC is pressed. All in all, I managed to learn a lot during this Ludum Dare. The game turned out pretty fun but missing depth and replayability. The graphics are very basic (I'm a programmer lol) and I didn't have enough energy to improve the sound system. Next time...

Feel free to check out the videos of the stream to see how I made the game and how I used visual scripting in Unity3D.

Screenshots

...and I have a Mac :scream: :cold_sweat:

This LD jam's theme is: Your life is currency.

I decided to finally join this LD jam! It has been a long time since I made anything in Unity and even longer since the last time I joined Ludum Dare. I'm excited. So exited in fact that I could not sleep, heh. It is 03:07 here in Slovakia, but my current insomnia made me get up and check the theme. Perfect match! :smirk::smirk::smirk:

Anyway, tools of choice, as always:

• Unity
• Aseprite
• Sfxr / Bfxr
• ??? we'll see how far I'll get with this
• Notion + paper for note taking

Good luck to everyone. Enjoy!

I just woke up after 5 hours of sleep (eh...). Anyway, I wrote down a couple of game ideas in the night. Now it's time to choose one and hop into Unity!

I just lost a ton of time trying to get the 2D skeletal animation work in Unity. This is as far as I got:

I give up. I just can't get it to work as I want and it eats a ton of CPU. Moving back to the good-ol' pixel animation.

I got rid of skeletal animation in 2D and got back to just moving game objects! It looks good.

I got rid of any 2D skeletal animation I was attempting before. Now back to just moving game objects. It looks good! :smile:

The next step is to define all body parts and handle the scene transitioning logic. :dark_sunglasses:

I finally finished the first part of the game. You can switch body parts and the state is stored globally even between different scenes. Nice!

I have the basic gameplay in place. But, it is just about 30% of what I originally wanted to do. I think I've bitten more that I can chew. Nevermind, the game is playable already, just not that fun yet...

I decided to ditch all remaining features that I wanted to implement and jump to polishing the game. Things like animations and in-game tutorials. :handshake:

I'm finally done! I'm so sleepy I am barely able to submit the game :laughing:

Play Self Surgeon on my submission page

Finished and submitted. Go play and rate it on my submission page.

Hey y'all! I finally managed to finish writing a post-mortem for Self Surgeon. I decided to write it in Notion, just like all my notes for the game. Read the post-mortem here and let me know what you think in the comments:

https://www.notion.so/dzejky/Self-Surgeon-Post-Mortem-Public-3486c9da66574ef5b76419b316037799

Just woke up after 8 hours of sleep, feeling fresh and prepared. This is an interesting theme for a game.

Now, I won't have that much time to work on a game this weekend, so I have to keep it extremely simple this time. Also, this is the first time I'll be using Godot instead of Unity to make the game, so it will be a huge success if I even manage to produce any sort of a game. :laughing:

Good luck to everybody and have fun!

A tiny tree starts to grow... I'm trying this idea where a tree is growing and you must grow its roots to support it, deeper and deeper.