Here’s what I have so far. Unfortunately it’s not a game yet. Maybe I’ll be able to get something fun to play tomorrow for the jam.

Tags: gameplay video, video, zombie

OK now it looks like a game. But less than 6 hours are left on the counter to make some levels.

I need the sugar

Tags: foodphoto, video

This entry was posted on Monday, December 19th, 2011 at 1:19 pm and is filed under LD #22. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

PLAY THE FINAL VERSION

So I managed to finish a game. Not in 48 hours as intended but 72 Well, I thought that might be the case.  So I didn’t worry too much when I lost a lot of time doing the cute little character.

Can you find the kitty?

Tags: final, kitten-challenge, kitty, video, zombie

Hello again ludum people,

So I’ve already made a declaration/tools post but here’s an updated version of the montage picture that started it all. Also a graph of my results…

As you can see the graphics are usually my strong point (which is funny since I’m a programmer who couldn’t draw a stick figure to save his life not long ago) but the rest isn’t so great. One thing I notice is that Fun seems to follow the Innovation curve. So maybe I should try to be more original. I don’t know but I think I’ll try to aim at something more fun and lively this time. We’ll see how that goes.

All we need is a montage

I’m a nerd, I love graphs

As requested, percentile rank

where the magic happens…

Tags: deskphoto, goals, montage, stats

So as usual I’ve started something way too big and I’m spending all my time playing with texture tools and things like that. So no game yet but I have a floating head. How cool is that?

Behind the doors are supposed to be the game areas, they don’t exist yet. Also I’ll probably need to abandon my 3rd person idea to save time on the main character even though i already lost some making the camera and controls for it. There is a good chance I’ll have to submit in the jam category.

It glows!

Tags: screenshot, wip

I knew that I wasn’t going to finish this game in 48h. I tried anyway so that I have a chance to finish in 72

So here’s a new screenshot showing the main character and the rabbit!

Derpy rabbit FTW!

Tags: screenshot, wip

So here’s what I’m going to use for this LD.

I’ll use Unity 4 as my engine and C# for my programming.

For graphics my workflow is ZBrush (sculpting, painting, auto-uv and auto-retopo)-> Modo (general poly modeling, manual uv and retopo) -> Blender (animation). For texturing not done directly in ZBrush, Substance for texture generation (and maybe Filter Forge too) and of course Photoshop to put everything together. Maybe I’ll experiment with that new dDo texture generator.

For music, Reason and Reaper with the Garritan Instant Orchestra sounds. Also Adobe Audition for editing my sound effects. And I just bought Vocaloid in case I want (and I have the time) to have fun with that. I was also thinking about maybe using Band-in-a-Box for procedural generation because I actually don’t know that much about music…

I guess I won’t have the time to play with everything… :/

yeah software!

Tags: tools

So it’s been two years since I made my original montage video, so I decided to update it with my latest games from recent LDs…

Don’t worry, kitty! There will be a lot moar!

Tags: montage

So here is my traditional desk picture! i have posted so many it seems a bit redundant but hey it’s fun when I look back at all my desk pictures over the years.

Red alert! Battle stations!

Also here is the percentile rank graph of my LD results so far because I’m such a nerd (please don’t hate me ). This way the results are independent of the number of participants so for example a percentile rank of 60% would mean my entry scored higher than 60% of the entries.

So I can see my previous entry did well, but I need to focus on Theme and Innovation.

Previous posts:

• Video of all my previous LD games
• My tools for this LD
• My general advice for Ludum Dare

Tags: deskphoto

So here’s my timelapse for my game!

The beginning is code and placeholder but it starts being fun with some sculpting at 00:55! 😀

Tags: timelapse

Woohoo, it’s finally time for another LD!

I have just noticed that nearly all my software still has files from the previous LD in the most recent files menu :/ Time to finally do some gamedev again!

I’ll be using:

• Unity 3D 4.1 Pro (coding in C#)
• Modo 701, ZBrush 4R5, Blender 2.66, Photoshop CS6, Substance Designer 3.5, Vue 11 Infinite (maybe)
• Reason 6.5, Reaper whatever-is-latest, Garritan Instant Orchestra, Shreddage, Band-in-a-Box 2013, Adobe Audition CS6 (and SFXR if I run out of time for proper sound effects)

GOOD LUCK TO ALL!

And here are all the games I managed to make during a LD:

Moar gamez!

Tags: declaration, montage, tools

Sorry I have not posted any update yet… I’m soloing the jam here’s a little screenshot teaser:

I like making things glow

On the todo list for today: more levels, sounds, music, better character animation and some props and more varied textures to make the levels prettier.

Tags: screenshot, wip

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Index of games 1|2|3|4

The last part is released, it’s a bit shorter than the others but still full of good games! That’s all for this LD! Thank you for participating and my apologies if somehow your game got left out (I hope I got everybody).

People make a lot of games during a Ludum Dare. We have reached a point where it’s impossible to play all the games ourselves. But what if we could just sit down and relax while watching as many 10 seconds video clips of the games as we can?

I think that would be pretty neat. This is why I’ve decided to create such a compilation video. However I cannot possibly do it alone. You have to help me by recording a 10 seconds video showing your game and uploading it somewhere I can download it.

I will mass download the files and compile them into videos you can enjoy. I hope many people participate and we end up with hours worth of your awesome games!

Things to keep in mind:
– please use well supported video formats (ex. avi, mp4, mov with common codecs)
– The final video will be 1280×720 so 16:9 aspect ratio is best but I’ll letterbox other formats.
– only upload videos of actually gameplay of your Ludum Dare #26 entry
– the audio should be just your game audio please (or silence if your game has no audio)
– 10s maximum, 20MB file size limit
– IMPORTANT: only use hosting services that allow direct linking to the file itself (dropbox for example). So that I can download the files automatically.

Some video capture tools you could use:
http://camstudio.org/ (free)
http://www.bandicam.com/ (commercial, free trial)
http://www.fraps.com/ (commercial, free trial)

“For those on a Mac, screen capture can be done easily with Quicktime (go to File > New Screen Recording)” (Tip submitted by jacklehamster)

Please allow a few days for the first compilation to be made. I can’t wait to see what the result will look like!
FORM CLOSED!

Tags: 10s videos, community project, video

Time for a little post-mortemy thing. I suspect nobody reads them, but in a few years, I’ll go through my old posts and find it and have a good laugh. Let’s use a chronological format for a change!

Hole in one!

Before the jam

As usual I didn’t practice for it, I didn’t do any gamedev or graphics or anything related since the previous LD :/ So I was rusty. At the end of last year, I had some time in between jobs to learn new ZBrush skills but I didn’t know how much I had lost since then. Three ludum dare per year is just not enough practice.

The theme is revealed!

Of all the themes in the preliminary rounds, there was only one I really hated, yup: minimalism.

I hate it because all LD games are already minimalistic by necessity. The whole point of participating in a Ludum Dare is to see how much you can do in a limited time. Choosing minimalism as the theme, is basically giving up before you even start. In my opinion, there are already too many minimalistic games in a regular LD. Games where the author instead of trying to work on all aspects of a game decides that colored squares placeholders are good enough. This isn’t about how good your skills are, it’s about at least giving it a try and learning in the process. Don’t aim for minimalism, aim big! It’s better to fail gloriously than to not even try!

Day 1: Anti-minimalism 3rd person shooter

After recovering from discovering that terrible theme, my first idea was to make an anti-minimalism game, I thought about a few ideas like destroying minimalist paintings and finally I chose to do a 3rd person shooter where you fight alien invaders trying to impose their minimalistic philosophy on Earth. I’ve never made a LD game where you can shoot stuff, my games tend to be peaceful, so this might have been the occasion to change that?

I spent half the first day working on the shooter mechanics and enemies and for the second half I worked on my main character.

Day 2: New game idea

After waking up, I realized that I was not very far along with my shooter game. The shooting part wasn’t really fun and I realized I would need a ton of custom animations for it to work with my character. And while I had some ideas to create a funny world, they didn’t really all fit together with the gameplay and I had no clear vision of what the game would actually be like.

At this point, I had implemented a way to push the aliens bodies once they are killed. And I realized it’s actually quite fun to just play with that and try to move them around. How about a game where you just have to push a ball around with physics?

So I already had my main character, the gameplay only required a trivial amount of work, the rest of the day was spent working on a few levels. At the end of the 48h I had something I could have released in the compo category if I rushed the final hours but I wanted to use the extra day to make the game a little bit better.

Day 3: Polish!

For the first time in a LD, I started the final day knowing I already had something that I could finish and release any time I wanted. Things I did that day:

Prettified the levels with some props and alternative textures and I added two more levels with a bit more elaborate mechanics (unfortunately the one with the bridge has a bit of a nasty bug, I didn’t notice it in my testing due to being biased as to how I expected the level to be solved. It wasn’t even a code bug, I just forgot a two-clicks setting in Unity How annoying!).

I tried to improve my character’s animation (without much success, animation is something I’ve never really spent time learning, I just fake it during game jams. I’ll work on that for the next LD).

I spent a bit more time than usual on the sounds, and even though the music is a randomly generated .mid file, I did spend some time in Reason choosing instruments and mixing it for a little extra.

In the end, I even had time to turn the code I had written for the minimalistic aliens into butterflies. A poetic way to end the conversion of what started as a shooting game in to a totally non-violent one

After the jam

I’m really glad I got lots of feedback this time. Over a hundred people played and rated my game, that was most likely due to getting an extra bit of spotlight thanks to my video compilation project but it’s nice to have my audience expand like that. That’s one good thing about making a game for a LD, you are pretty much guaranteed actual players! 😀

Also thanks to the wonders of Twitch technology, I was able to see two people play my game in real time. I don’t usually see anybody play my games at all and that was really interesting as both did unexpected things.

For next time

• Animation has to be my priority. I have improved my character creation skills so now the animation has to follow or it looks a bit weird.
• Try to work on at least another game to avoid getting too rusty in between LDs

PLAY MY GAME HERE

Tags: postmortem

Mmmm, I wasted way too much time on my character. It would be OK if I was doing the jam. I got too used to having an extra day and as a result finishing a game tomorrow is going to be quite hard.

Tags: first screenshot, screenshot, wip, WIP Day 1

After a streak of 7 finished ludum dare in a row, I must admit that LD28 defeated me.

What went wrong?

• Well, I had a bit of a cold all weekend, so I wasn’t very productive and since I was very tired, I decided to let myself sleep as much as I could so I just didn’t work as much as usual.
• It took me a while to motivate myself to make a game for this theme.
• The theme restriction prevented me from moving my game into a different direction, that might have been more fun and easier to finish because I had to stick to my initial excuse for “you only get one”
• I lacked a clear and strong concept for my game, so I ended up toying with it rather than moving toward a finished game in a straight line.
• Increasing expectations, especially after LD26 which went very well, I have had increasing expectations about what the quality of my game should be.

But anyway I had fun, I didn’t finish but I did spend most of 3 days playing with Unity, ZBrush, Substance Designer, etc and I got some embryo of a game out of it. Anyway, here’s a screenshot:

Tags: fail

At least I made a derpy animation for my enemy guy... Will there be an actual game?

None of the themes in the final round are particularly inspiring, but hopefully that won't stop me from adding one more to the collection:

I can't do sh*t without a ton of software:

• Unity 2019.3 (Always nice and easy to do things quickly)
• Visual Studio 2017 (mostly as a text editor)
• ZBrush 2020 (The best for sculpting quick models)
• Modo 14 (Solid 3d "hub" application for modeling, uvs, retopo)
• Substance Designer (for creating procedural textures)
• Substance Painter (for 3d painting on my models)
• Photoshop (image editing)
• Akeytsu (easy to use character animation software)
• Studio One 4 with various VSTs (my favorite DAW, I'm really bad at music though)
• Adobe Audition (for sound effects recording)

And possibly:

• Vue (always good as a skybox generator)
• Plant Factory (maybe if I need to generate plants, could be useful if Garden wins)
• Marvelous Designer (cloth simulation, unlikely I'll have time for that, maybe I can use it to create some props)

Also I'm not sure if I'll do VR, I have wanted to make a VR LD game for years but I never do, it's just too much extra difficulty for me but maybe?