Forgot the goat! (also an anarchist)

Still time to upload an updated version.

(I know it looks like a dog… 😐 )

Inquisitor’s Note: Under interrogation, the insurgent “dustystylus” was deemed to have screamed the following:

Original plans

When the topic was announced, I thought about some recent uprisings in the world where communications were monitored and thought about a game where you don’t know where the enemy is and have to decode their signals to find them.

Aesthetically, I’m a fan of all things Russian, so I wanted to have a vaguely eastern look and feel the game. The name Victor Grozny is a play on Ivan Grozny, who we know in the west better as Ivan the Terrible.

What went right:-
– Unity. This was my first time using Unity 3D and it turned out to be a great choice.
– Unity… let’s you get away with some atrocious coding and scripting hacks… which is exactly what you need when you’re under pressure to just get stuff working.
– Music. This is one of the bits of the 48hr game making process that I like the most. It’s nice to take a break from the code to play around with musical ideas, I find it refreshes the brain a little bit for when you head back into the code again.
– FX. Heehee, I was going to record my own voice for the radio chatter, but had an idea to translate English to Welsh and get Google Translate to ‘talk’ it, and then record that back into Reaper, and then process it with various FX (pitch adjust and transistor distortion). They’re actually quoting from the Magna Carta about the rights of citizens not to be oppressed. ;o)

What went wrong:-

– Fun. Well, a lack of it really. Before posting my entry I asked a friend to take a look at it. “well, it’s not very fun” was the reply and he was right. I almost didn’t post my entry.
– Controls. It was a terrible idea to have the game use click & drag for the 4 knobs. You spend all the time looking at the knobs rather than the map display. It would’ve made more sense to have the mouse control XY and then use either keys or mouse-click-hold for the other controls. Make it feel more ‘interactive’.
– Unity. Well, let me elaborate. I had a panic on the Saturday morning… this was the first time I’d used Unity and was struggling a bit, so I closed Unity and opened up Eclipse with an idea to do a pixel-art game instead. After a couple of hours I went back to Unity again and decided to press ahead with it. Definitely made the right choice but I lost a few hours to that indecision on my part.
– Clash of art styles. The GFX for the Inquisitor, Insurgents and Buildings are pixel art… this is because it was going to be a LWJGL pixel art game (I thought it would save time). Didn’t have time to work on better replacements.

Conclusion

I still like the basic premise of the game and am thinking about developing a much more strategic version. I will definitely use Unity in future. However, I’m going to prepare some foundation LWJGL code so that I have the option to something pixel-art based if the mood so takes me.

Ooh, uploaded a Linux version as well, as you guys don’t have access to the webplayer
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-25/?action=preview&uid=15902

Hmm, not so sure about this theme, but one must do or do not, there is no try!

Minimalism makes me think of art… and art makes me think of art critics… and art critics make me think of… Brian Sewell!

So, my game with have plummy-voiced Brian declaring war on the art students trying to turn London into a minimalist hell hole.

I have no idea if I’ll have time to finish this, but I’m determined to have fun with it either.

(can always enter the jam if I’m late?)

Welcome to Brian Sewell’s school of minimalism.

“Your art is awful and you should feel bad!”

Wheeeeee! Arguably my favourite bit of Ludum Dare is making the music. 😀

I usually go straight for Cubase, but this feels like a Fruity Loopy sort of game. Currently using the 64bit beta of FL Studio which has some wierdness in places which hopefully they’ll sort out before they release the final 64bit FL later in the year.

Oh Brian… you’re harsh but you’re fair.

Well, I think I’m pretty much done with the game.

It’s a pretty dreadful game actually… but perhaps I take his critiques to heart. ;____;

Okay I’m done with this. I’m off for a mushroom slice at a BP garage.

In the meantime, Digital Brian wants to tell you that your paintings are ghastly.

Just a re-post from earlier to remind Unity/Dropbox users to please use HTTP not HTTPS (which Dropbox uses by default). It can in some instances result in people not being able to play your game in their browser even though they have Unity Webplayer properly installed. ;___;

When the theme first came up, “Minimalism”, I wasn’t happy or sad… I was more like… whaaaa? So, off to Wikipedia I verily did trundle. The part of it that I was most familiar with was art… and art discussion… and art discussion makes me think of art critics, and art critics make me think of the wonderfully plummy-voiced UK art critic, Brian Sewell, so I decided early on that the game would have him in some way.

This is not the game I intended to make!

Original Plan
… was to have Brian as a sprite and similar to Ghostbusters (on the ZX Spectrum), you’d move around a grid city, except this would be London and you would be chasing art students who are turning London’s lovely landmarks (“St Paul’s Cathedral”, “Nelson’s Column”, etc.) into Minimalist versions and you had to race to correct them, all the while with Brian shouting “ghastly, you rotters”!

What went wrong

Well, it soon dawned on me the amount of sprites that I would have to draw to do this. There was (at a minimum) 4-directional Brian, a series of buildings, detailed landmarks (in both real and minimalist version). So, if Brian wasn’t going to be running and shooting, he could be talking!

My flat is rather small, and I was embarrassed that my neighbours might hear my Brian Sewell impersonations, so I took my little Zoom H2N into my office as no one was about and went BRIANTASTIC without a care in the world.

What went right

I started with a small sprite before I even got the game together and very much built it on the fly (as you tend to do in LD).

A fair bit of time was spent in Unity3D learning how to draw dynamically on a Texture2D. As I was pressed for time, I ended up using the native Texture2D.SetPixel, GetPixel and SetPixels(Color[] ) functions… which actually turned out to be really fast!

The more I use Unity (which I only started using for the last LD), the more I fall in love with it, and how it makes it so easy to get your ideas moving as quickly as possible.

Me fail ludum? That’s unpossible!

Unity, Photoshop, Blender and, of course, Flootyroops for teh ph4t b33tz!!!1

Starting a bit late on this one (woke up, checked topic, went back to bed for 6 hours) but I’m already thinking I’ve bitten off more than I can chew.

As I dozed off I had the idea of mixing 2 old Atari ST games, the interrogation from The Killing Cloud, and the communication interface from Captain Blood.

You only get one interview with each suspect and need to find out WHO ATE ALL THE PIES! D:

Graphically I’d like to get something similar to Pigeon Street meets Monty Python.

PS – Cultural Reference – “Shut it you slag” – phrase from a seminal 70s BBC crime series “The Sweeney”.

So far…
– Recorded audio. A few keywords and random cockney rhyming slang.
– Speech interpreter is ‘kinda’ working.
– Wrote some incredibly naff music… featuring Kazoo! (you’re in for a treat!)
– Replaced quicky art with some new Monty-Python-esque assets.

So… so shleepy. ;___;

I knew that global variables in some form would be my downfall in some way. I’ve spent most of the afternoon trying to figure out a bug involving duplicate keys in a Dictionary. These were being pulled out of a global static class where the dictionary was being populated… but not cleared… between level loads. The delightful flaura and fauna of sheer bugs that seemed completely unrelated was remarkable. David Attenborough would’ve had a field day.

To get the game ready, I’ve had to cut out suspect #3 which is a shame. Anyway, it’s now possible to put these slaaaaaags in jail for pie theft.

Sarge: “Al’wight, listen up you slaaaags… there’s been a robbery of a meaty and savoury variety and I intend to get to the bottom of this. Jenkins! You only get one hour with the suspect.”
Jenkins: “Only hour, Sarge?
Sarge: “Actually, it’s more like 2 minutes…”
Jenkins: “Crikey!”
Sarge: “SHUT IT!”

YOU CAN PLAY IT ‘ERE, MY PEDIGREE CHUMS…

After waking up to read the topic I went back to bed and thought about a few ideas in the small hours. “You only get one” – for some reason made me think of “24” or these cop shows where they have to get their man (or woman) in a certain time frame. There was an old ST game called “The Killing Cloud” by Konami that had a cool interrogation scene and I wanted to do something similar. So I borrowed another idea from an old (1988!!) ST game called Captain Blood which had a crude language interpreter.

What Went Right

It’s no secret that I particularly love doing silly sound FX and writing Music most of all for LD… which gets me thinking that maybe next time I’ll join a JAM group simply to do the music and FX. I’d decided to go for a Monty Python-esque graphic style and I’m actually quite pleased with how it turned out. I think I work faster this way than with pixel art, which I’m not very good at. (some of you people are mind-bogglingly good!)

I wanted a Python-meets-70s-UK-cop-show-The-Sweeney with plenty of silly phrases, (aka SHUT IT YOU SLAAAAG).

What Went Wrong

1. Don’t bite off more than you can chew

Implementing a language interpreter like Captain Blood turned out to be much more work than I anticipated! By the time I’d actually got it functional, I still needed to write the actual dialogs and knowledge for the suspects. There were originally meant to be 3 suspects and towards the deadline I was lucky to get the 2 finished! Sadly, the hints system conflicted with the actual results being said back to you which confused things rather than helping. I took out several words to make the game easier. There’s a ton of words that never got used! ;____; Also, I should’ve used 2 rows of icons like Captain Blood rather than the huge scroll-fest.

Captain Blood 1988 Language Interpreter

LD 28 Language Interpreter

 2. Beware of Global Variables

Horrible errors started appearing and the laguage interpreter wouldn’t appear properly… but only when restarting or loading a new level. D: I hunted for hours to find the problem… turns out it was in a Global Static class where data was being loaded into a Dictionary that was constantly held in game memory… but wasn’t being wiped between levels. Don’t be led to believe that Application.LoadLevel(…) will magically reset everything! These classes persist… and there was no good reason to make it global in the first place!

3. Use the Right Tool for the Right Job

You’d think for a 2D game I would’ve used Unity’s new Sprite system? Nope, I couldn’t be bothered reading up on it, so the character is actually implemented as a skeleton with textures attached to quads in the skeleton heirarchy!

On the Saturday I got round to watching a video tutorial on the new Unity Sprite system… and WOW… it would have solved so many issues from the start. As usual, the Unity documentation is a little bit sparse, but the power in there is incredible. The “intro” to the game is done using the sprite system once I’d figured out how it worked.

You can play the game here: WHO ATE ALL THE PIES ???

Walk-through for the first geeeeeza.

I’m in for LD, but I’ll be travelling around so will only have my laptop with me.

This probably means less polished graphics and sound… but in some ways those limits might be a blessing as I’ll have time to think about much better gameplay which has always been sadly lacking in my previous entries.

Development: Unity3D, C#
Graphics: GIMP, ASEprite
Music/Sound: Reaper (would prefer FL Studio, but using Macbook)

Now, for goodness sake, remember to pack the mouse this time! (trackpad horror)

… which is cockney rhyming slang for ‘wrong’.

10 hours after the theme announced and I’m on a train, trying to think up ideas. The theme ‘Beneath The Surface’ is nice, and got me thinking about water surface and if there was something I could do with that. 20,000 Leagues being one of my favourite books, I wanted to do something where, like Captain Nemo, you ram ships but are vulnerable when you come to the surface.

However, 6 hours later and all I’ve got in Unity is a quick Blender mock-up which moves around the surface of  a plane. No baddies, no AI, no real ‘game’ code at all.

To make it worse, I don’t have my Unity Pro licence on this laptop… and can’t access my other machines to get it. The Macbook keyboard makes Blender a nightmare to navigate in. The mouse also doesn’t have middle or right button. I feel like I’m working at about 5% efficiency at the moment.

Might have to conceded defeat on this one.

Hooray, we’re being shot at! This is good news, as there’s actually some skill required now, as opposed to just meandering across the pretty seascape. Currently, you’re given away by depth, and also ocean froth / bubbles produced by going too fast.

As stated previously, I started this LD wayy to late, so I’m wondering whether to try for 48hr or polish it up for a Jam entry. Anyway, time for a celebratory beer and a snooze.

… but alas I am too tired and my family have been tolerant enough as it is.

PLAY IT HERE

And here is some incredibly and obnoxiously loud title music courtesy of Soundcloud’s inability to include a volume control on their player. D: