Today went pretty smoothly. We spent the first-hour brainstorming and settled on a pretty fun idea. You're a call center operator and the more phone calls that come in the longer people have to wait, the angrier they get, more phone calls, a cacophony of ringing, the bad reviews roll in on your feed, your stress levels rise, you get antsier.
Time to sleep now. See you all tomorrow. Good luck!
Today I got the Review system in. Now callers will get to leave a review on you after you the phone call hangs up. Some of them are just rude though.. >.<
Added about ~70 lines of 'wabba bub bub' VO and now working on getting sneaky fun things to find, while my teammate writes reviews. Still quite a few hours before the day is out!
So we have come to the end of Stint 2. It was a long one. 18 hours. Bringing us to the 39 hour mark. Seeing that @Villa and I are working as a team we're just over the halfway point for the Jam category.
No pictures in this one. Writing it from the fetal position in bed on my phone. Though you can catch some cheeky gifs over on my Twitter (@DraperDanMan): https://twitter.com/DraperDanMan
Tomorrow the stress system, writing dialogue, a few new meshes and some more sounds! Good night/insertTime.
These last 24 hours have been a huge push to get the experience polished up and ready by the deadline. Of course, there is always so much more time in publishing than you remember from last time. Writing a synopsis and bio. uploading, taking images, video, editing, linking, etc.
Building the atmosphere of a call center was really quite fun. So much of it had to do with sound. I spent several hours in FL Studio & Audacity yesterday making phone sounds, ambiance, music, radio speeches, voice acting and more I'm sure.
We had a huge focus on making sure everything was diagetic for the player so I went and added a little notification pop up on the monitor to give information on the player performance. The only thing we didn't get time to make diagetic was the Games title and credits. Which we just settled with a nice fade in and out during the opening cutscene.
We would love to hear your feedback!
► DOWNLOAD
Alright! This sure comes around fast! I'm going to take this opportunity to see if I can make a MIXER interactive game.
So I'll try get the stream up and running asap over on mixer.com/drapsicle (Mixer wouldn't let me have the username DraperDanMan...😭) It could be a really interesting iteration loop to have views feeling changes in real-time almost.
Probably Using: Unity, Mixer, Audacity, FL Studio, Blender, Affinity Designer.
Every event it's always terrifying at the 12-hour mark. You never feel far enough along, yet there is so much time left to fill. Every time, I feel like I'm actually doing pretty well. Everyone is doing really well.
So far player can turn in the Mixer.com channel and play around in the bouncy sandbox of an arena. I haven't touch art or sound yet, It's mainly been back-ended code and dealing with mixers SDK + issues.
If you want to give it a crack or just come along and say Hi. I'm streaming over at https://mixer.com/drapsicle
I know everyone is in a rush, so just shoot me a message and I'll boot up the prototype for you join in.
<3 Good Luck Everyone! I'm enjoying reading all of your stories too!
I have been head down working like mad for the last 21 hours. It's almost there. BUT! I still need to name this beast. Up to 8-player, Mixer.com Stream Interactive Turn Based Brawler. All I've been able to come up with is BRIXER which is pretty lame just mushing Brawl & Mixer.
Hopefully, it's stable enough to leave running 24/7 for a few days while voting opens! Though I'm tipping my internet will give out first.
Submitted for Compo, feels great. Now I'm left with a conundrum. Because it's a live game requiring a stream to be run 24/7, I don't have a dedicated machine I can let it run on. I'm thinking I'll have the stream run for the next 24/48 hours. But after that just doing specific time slots.
Head on over to https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/skirmixer and head to the link to play. I'll try spend time in-queue for a few hours to play with people.
See you at the top!
What a crazy 40 hours it's been since I released Skirmixer out into the wild.
Skirmixer is probably the weirdest most technically complex Jam game I've made solo.
For those that haven't seen it yet. You don't download Skirmixer and play. Instead, you tune into a livestream and play live on the stream with some controls that mixer.com supports. On the down time while people are afk or asleep it plays bot games so there is something to watch.
After about 8 hours the stream got featured on the front page which was really awesome then the viewer grew to really scary numbers (I think about 200 people was the peak) which was really rad! But my buggy 48 hour game totally wasn't ready for that many players. So quite a few issues came to light!
Since then around 1000 people have stopped by to have a go or watch a couple of rounds! Really Really cool. You can come play over at https://mixer.com/Drapsicle
After 24 hours of solid panic at so many people seeing my Jam game. I feel really proud of what I've achieved! <3
I decided to do something for LD42 knowing I was busy for most of the duration. I have something that is getting there but really needs to be bookended with start and game over sequences.
I'm considering whether to just submit to the Jam instead and give myself some extra time after work tomorrow to finish it up.
This is probably my most ambitious LDJam yet and really aims to test a few things I wanted to try, tech-wise and gameplay wise.
So the idea is that you move from room to room collecting Items of different rarity. and you have to sacrifice one of the same rarity as the door to the next room.
There is a couple of dev videos on Twitter. I'll be posting a few more every couple of hours of progress. Now that there is stuff to see. https://twitter.com/DraperDanMan/status/1069137099972964352/video/1
Good luck everyone 16.5 hours left!
Yeah, this was so ambitious for 48 hours + work on Monday. Have work in 7 hours. So I should be responsible and get some sleep.
Things are looking pretty sweet, just need enemies shooting back and a few variations and it should be good to go.
I would love to do another pass of level designs and expand the number of rooms the player can visit, but as a proof of concept, I think this works pretty well.
Hope you're doing well. I see a few people are done and submitted already! woot!
I don't get to share much of my work these days as the projects the company I work for are under NDA. So LDJam's & Global Game Jam are the only times my twitter gets to come alive with game dev stuff. Looking forward to spending the weekend prototyping!
Good luck everyone! good to see familiar faces around the blog-o-sphere!
Working with people is great. The last few times I've worked in a pair to help newcomers to the industry complete their first jam. However, this comes with the downsides of teaching and discussion that can take up a lot of time.
The final round themes are alright, I'm glad that spending the few hours to slaughter over 3000 themes was helpful in weeding out the trash.
Look forward to seeing what everyone does. Going to try using Unity URP this jam because in my day job we still use the legacy renderer.
Looking to try going outside my comfort zone this time. But we'll see...
Let's do this.
Alright, I'm in again. I've got most of the weekend free this time. So looking forward to a solid jam. A few friends are also participating this time around so it's going to be fun to compare ideas and how we interpret the theme.
The final round is a little split down the middle on conceptual themes and specific themes. But overall, should be another good jam. Looks like many people are figuring our ambiguous themes make for the best themes.
Good luck everyone!
I've been in quite the predicament these last few years working in AAA game development, where I'm unable to publicly participate in Game Jam or and games related work or media. Over the last few months I've been building a little engine around a small game I've been building in my spare time. I think the tooling is at a point where it could be used for other projects too and it's temping to join LD, and then use it on a project in a short amount of time and feel out the flaws and sore points.
This all hedges on my work status though. :upside_down: apparently I haven't participated in LD since 49