Our first LudumDare has started with a brainstorming session to decide what we want to work on. The theme of ‘The monster is you’ is fairly open-ended, and we talked about playing one of the ghosts in a 3D Pacman, as well as using building mechanics for a voxel-based puzzle game. After some reflection we decided these are potentially too complicated, as one sixth of our time is almost up already!

Instead we’re going to build a game in Unreal Engine 4, starting from the Twin Stick Shooter template and simply seeing how far we can get. This gives us a starting point which is already playable and we’ll just swap out as much code and art as we can. It’s still risky though – I’ve never worked with Unreal myself, and Matt has played with the engine (via Cubiquity) but never made a game.

There’ll be no voxels/Cubiquity in the initial game, though we may add that in if we get time. First order of business is to get the character movement working as we want, add some enemies (heros, as we are the monster!), and some basic AI. For those that don’t know, the initial template looks like this:

Let’s see how far we can get!

We’ve decided that Matt will do most of the programming while I do most of the art. I’m getting started by blocking-out the arena in MagicaVoxel, just so we can test our import pipeline.

At this point we are indeed planning to use voxels for the visual style, but it’s not yet clear if they will be involved in the gamepla.

I’ve now made a couple of basic character models, again using MagicaVoxel. The monster will be controlled by the player, and will be chased around the arena and attacked by the peasants.

Matt’s a little busy with programming at the moment so he isn’t providing many updates, but he’s given me a couple of screenshots of the scene loaded in Unreal Engine 4. It’s looking pretty good!

We’ll probably need to do some tweaking of the lighting and colors as it’s a little bright at then moment, but it’s basically working and is already playable

We’ve made some good progress today and have a game which is somewhat playable. Matt has got a number of enemies chasing the player around the map, and the player can fight back by throwing fireballs to kill them. The aim is simply to survive as long as you can with enemies spawning more and more quickly.

On the art side I’ve continued building the arena and adding a variety of decorations. There’s now a castle in the top-left corner, which is where the game will start with you having just broken out of the keep. I also added a waterfall which you can walk underneath and some paths to generally guide the player around.

We are using Cubiquity for UE4 for all the voxel stuff but the map is currently static. We’re hitting various issues with collision meshes and navigation meshes which we are working around with dirty hacks. We’d quite like to make the environment destructible but this will further complicate the collision and navigation problems, so we’re not sure if that will happen as there’s lots of other things to do!

Well, we finished the game! We actually stopped a few hours early due to being on UK time but we’re both really pleased with what we have achieved in the time. Our first Ludum Dare has been a really great experience so we hope we can come back for more next time. Here’s the link to the game for those who want to play it:

• — Download ‘The Peasants Are Revolting!’ —

And some screenshots for those who just want an impression:

We’re going to let the dust settle for a few days, and after that we’ll probably do a post on our main blog where we summarize our Ludum Dare experience and talk about what we have learned.