A quick video playthrough of Stickleback for anyone finding the destroyers a bit brutal.

What floated nicely:

– Aesthetic. I was quite pleased with the low-poly retro look I ended up with. In fact, it made me nostalgic for an old game I’d love to do a retro remake of; Hunter. Incidently, this low-poly look was a result of the issues I had in the next section.

– Music. ImageLine released a beta version of FL Studio for the Mac which I hadn’t really tested. In the end, it performed exceptionally well and I had no problem knocking a tune together very quickly. Otherwise, I’d have had to use Reaper which, whilst being an amazing app, I don’t feel very creative with. Well done ImageLine!

– Ideas. I really liked the theme! On the train I brainstormed ideas about subterranean building, aka Dungeon Keeper, etc., but switching to the oceans I felt rather nostalgic about 20,000 leagues under the sea, one of my favourite books, so I began to play with themes about ramming ships.

What sank: 

– Time constraints. I had to travel at the weekend so much of the time was spent with just the macbook. Didn’t get started until about 10 hrs after the start.

– Stealth aspect. Sadly, one of the major themes was that you would be able to stealthily avoid enemy ships, before speeding up and hitting them on their flank and sinking them. I couldn’t get a fine balance between the risk posed in breaking out of stealth and then speeding up to ramming speed. Inevitably, you end up just staying at full speed to get away from the projectile shots from the destroyers, rendering the stealth aspect somewhat pointless.

– Toolset. We are immensely blessed to have access to such an amazing tool as Blender. However, I had not anticipated how much I relied on the numeric keypad for workflow when using it on my Macbook. Whilst you can emulate it with the number keys, I’d also become used to the positions on the numeric pad. As such, I really struggled with designing objects and navigating the app. Hence the ships in the game didn’t turn out as nicely as the stickleback itself due to time constraints and difficult navigation. Also, I should have packed a mouse with mousewheel and at least 3 buttons…

– Physics. I can haz non-kinetic player? Haha, it never fails to amaze me how much time I end up wasting trying to make the player purely controlled with physics forces and torque before I just give up and accept that the word “gameplay” involves a “game” and that controlling the ship should be reasonably enjoyable.

Conclusion

Whilst I really enjoyed the 48hr compo, I think I may go for a Jam entry in future. Sometimes the extra day (and extra sleep!) makes all the difference to the final entry.

You can play it here.

Frustratingly, I have only just had an opportunity to get started on my entry, so I think I’m probably going to have to go for something quite minimalist.

Speccy-style graphics it is, then…

Oookay, this game is morphing into a bad acid trip. Need more coffee… or less coffee… or something.

I’m in for the Jam, but out of necessity rather than choice as I’m working on Sat and Sun and will need all the extra time I can get.

As per usual, Unity3D is the development kit “du jour”.
Photoshop CS6 for art.
Cubase 7.5 for music.
Me + Zoom H2N for sound effects.

Worked 10-4 today and doing the same tomorrow… I don’t think I’ll even manage the Jam entry.

Anyway, here’s some pixel art done this evening for what was going to be a DREDD-inspired responder game where calls come in and you have to keep Dredd + rookies alive for 1 day. Everything is handled in the one screen with updates on the right and a text interpreter where you assign judges to sectors or to backup each other.

Trying to get to grips with Unity 4+ new UI system but I just… don’t… understand it. Left everything too late this time.

Alas, this is the first LD compo where I’ve chosen to bow out early. I knew in advance I would have to work this weekend (10-4) both Saturday and Sunday. Also, attempting to learn the new Unity UI system, I just got confused, frustrated and went back to the old one. Attempting to learn a new tech mid-compo is a bad plan.

But truth be told, even having switched to the Jam compo, it became clear that the game I was working on just wasn’t going to be FUN… and that has to be the number one consideration for all of us at the end of the day. I think it was a decent enough idea, but the execution was poor and irretrievable.

 (squished by WordPress)

Being all on one screen, I wanted a Dredd-themed control screen where you as the responder have to guide Dredd and a team of Rookies to different sectors. They can deal with crimes, but take damage. They can heal each other in the same sector. Dredd is indestructable but can only do one thing at a time. Leaving crimes hurts your efficiency as an operator, but dead rookies don’t look good on the Justice Dept balance sheets either.

I had some music I worked on yesterday that I decided to work on a bit more tonight. (the speech is text-to-speech and made via http://www.fromtexttospeech.com/  and processed through WarmVerb).

Better luck (and hopefully more time!) next LD.

Currently away in another country and only got the laptop with me. Could be an ‘excuse’, on the other hand, should be turned into a ‘challenge’. :3

I might jussst make it in for the Jam entry, as I quite like the topic and want to get a game out of it. At the same time, don’t want to submit something poorly implemented and unpolished. Onward!

Been a while since I did an LD, but I’m back in for this one, having a free weekend.

I’m wanting to use libGDX, but suspect I’ll probably fall back on Unity3D, though I’m nervous about Unity’s WebGL support. However, I haven’t coded Java in a long time and have probably forgotten all the caveats and pitfalls of good practice.

So, let’s theorise:

Programming: Eclipse / LibGDX
Art: Pixelmator (possibly ASEprite too)
Music / Sound: Cubase 7.5

Though most likely will run screaming and flapping my arms around to Unity at the 13th hour…

Stavros is stuck in his fancy dress costume. The paramedics are ringing his doorbell, but the 2 button controls to his chair are eclectic at best.

Cheer up Stavros, people will be playing with you soon! You’re in a (barely) working game now. 😀

Good luck everyone with the final few hours of Compo!

Just fixed a bug which could have made the annoying physics even more annoying. The old ‘accidentally cut & pasting physics code into the Update() rather than FixedUpdate()’ trick.

But don’t take my word for it. Have a play around with Stavros for yourself.

Think this is going to be another weird looking one. As the theme is Ancient Technology, the game is about a space-faring species who have lost contact with each other and must rely on Radio Waves to get back in touch with each other. It uses an idea from an earlier LD entry of mine which hopefully I can implement better this time.

If a hideously garish ultra-saturated palette is good enough for NMS, it’s good enough for me. 😛

Much of the game is working now which is cool. As you make radio contact with your lost species on other planets you’ll put together the parts of a song that will unite you all. Yay.

(edit – eww… dunno what happened with that last JPG, think my 3G compresses it…, PNG replacement)

Alas, due to teaching commitments, 3G-only access and shader trouble (looks different Win/Mac/WebGL) I’ve had to concede defeat on this one.

For the theme I chose “Radio Waves” for a futuristic species that has lost contact with it’s other planets. Basically, you rotate your planet until you pick up a distorted radio signal, the next stage of the game is to tune the signal until the piece of a song comes through. You then fly to the next planet until you collect all the pieces of a song that, when put together, sound like this: