I'm in
First Ludum Dare.
The tools will most likely end up being Unity, Blender, and Photoshop.
_for_science
LD 38
We have a Splash Screen.
Murder Mitosis is a chaotic arena dish match for 1-4 players. You can battle your friends (or our AI if you don't have any :upside_down:) in a small world that gets more crowded the more you fight.
Now back to work!
Murder Mitosis - Web Edition
We finally got the game ported to WebGL. We had to switch around the keyboard controls a little (turns out having the player repeatedly press Ctrl + S in a browser is not a great idea... :thinking:)
Web Edition: https://hastilyassembled.itch.io/murder-mitosis
Project Page: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/murder-mitosis
Good Morning, Ratings!
Just woke up to see that there is rating going on. Time to play some more new games, and rate some favorites! Be sure to check out our game Murder Mitosis, an arena game for 1-4 players (Yes, there's AI in there!)
We have already gotten some very positive and helpful feedback these last few days. Thanks a lot to all those who have already played it, and thank you for going to play and rate it right now! :wink:
Rate Murder Mitosis: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/murder-mitosis
Murder Mitosis: Eat, Convert, Crush!
We hastily assembled a short trailer video that hopefully conveys a rough gameplay idea of our 1-4 player arena jam game Murder Mitosis:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmKzk9eatf8
Try it now, if you haven't already. If you have, just try it again. :wink:
Rate Murder Mitosis: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/murder-mitosis
Your feedback thus far...
Jumping on that Word Cloud bandwagon! Here is your feedback for Murder Mitosis thus far:
If you haven't played our game yet, please do. If you have, please do so again!
Thank you for all the great feedback!
Rate Murder Mitosis: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/murder-mitosis
How did that happen?
Thank you all so much for all the great feedback! Apparently, we have gotten a whole lot of it already:
So rather than playing our game some more, go play other games that really need your feedback and ratings! @avavt made this awesome tool that allows you to find games that are close to getting their 20 votes:
Go out and play those!
~~Play Murder Mitosis: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/murder-mitosis~~ :wink:
A lot of feedback...
Again, thank you all so much for all the feedback! Here are some of our current stats:
So rather than playing our game some more, go play other games that really need your feedback and ratings! @avavt made this awesome tool that allows you to find games that are close to getting their 20 votes:
Go out and play those!
~~Play Murder Mitosis: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/murder-mitosis~~ :wink:
A Postmortem on Murder Mitosis
I felt like writing up my very first postmortem. This was not only my first Ludum Dare, but also my first game project that was actually released in some form.
We went into this as a team of two programmers with no artist on board and surprisingly little preparation. My team partner had never even worked with the Unity engine before this jam. Nevertheless, we stocked up on junk food and caffeine and just went for it. The next 72 hours were the most productive we had been in years...
What we ended up with Murder Mitosis. A fun little multiplayer arena game about strategic positioning and board control in a small petri dish, that gets more and more crowded as the game progresses.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmKzk9eatf8
What Went Right:
I am very happy with how well we managed to incorporate the theme. From the moment it was announced, we knew that we not only wanted something that resembled the theme visually, but we wanted the theme to be intrinsically linked with the game's mechanics. Styling the game around microbes in a petri dish was just an added bonus.
The game ended up being about tactical movement and trying to find space (and food) in a small arena. Little creatures are out to kill you and your only weapon is to convert them to your color and make them hunt your enemies instead. Every time you do this, however, these creatures multiply. This makes the arena more crowded and more deadly as the game progresses. The goal of the game is to trap your enemies, thus cutting them off from their food and starving them.
We had no artist on board, so the visuals had to be something simple. The creatures are just small colored bubbles and the players are simple boxes with cute pixel faces on them. I added in some shader magic to create pressure effects and an organic wobble to make everything seem more alive.
From then on I took over art duties and programming the AI. I quickly threw together the energy bars, the menu elements and a logo. I added cute little faces to the creatures that would change expression whenever they collided with each other. Very simple stuff really. I am quite pleased with how surprisingly pretty the game turned out in the end.
The AI on the other hand took a little longer to build. From the moment we had decided that we would do a multiplayer game, we knew we would have to have AI players in there, or most people just wouldn't be able to even play the game.
I ended up implementing a simple mesh navigation system. AI-Nodes around the arena are running subroutines to detect the amount of food and the number of enemy creatures in the vicinity. From that data a quality score is calculated. Each AI player simply tries to get to a position with the most food and as little enemies as possible nearby---without touching any enemies.
What Went Wrong:
Developing the AI ate up way too much of my time! That is not to say that it wasn't absolutely necessary to have good AI players. Instead, the problem was that I had it in my mind that I could solve that AI problem using local information only, instead of coding an underlying graph system. For some reason I thought that a graph and a simple navigation algorithm would take too long to build. So rather than going for the obvious solution I started tinkering. Needless to say, if I had just gone to work coding the graph solution right away, I would have saved half a day of work.
Another part that I am not happy with is the lack of options in regards to control schemes. You can customize your player character, but you select your input method from the button that you press when joining. While it's a minor issue it keeps bugging me personally. I guess that's just one of those features you have to eventually cut when doing a jam.
One thing that we should have definitely spent more time on was teaching players the game. When we first uploaded an early version of our game, people had trouble figuring out anything. Luckily, we still had enough time to redo the tutorial text in the menu screen before the jam ended. However, we still see some early confusion when players play the game for the first time, and it can take a moment until they catch on.
All these issues are really just symptoms of our biggest problem: Not having time to let anyone but ourselves playtest the game. This was mostly due to neither of us leaving the house. We had completely shut ourselves off from the outside world for the full 72 hours, which meant that we had noone in reach to play with.
Which brings me to the actual biggest problem of all: It was early sunday morning when we had suddenly run out of caffeine! With no time to leave the house, we decided to just order some stuff. Yes, there are people who will bring you caffeine. At least they claim that. We paid online, but noone ever showed up... :coffee::rage:
Overall:
Participating in the Ludum Dare Jam was an amazing experience. A great demonstration of what can be achieved in little time, by just neglecting sleep and basic hygiene...
It was great fun, if you are interested in what we'll be turning this game into after the jam, follow us on Twitter @HastilyAssemble or on YouTube.
If you haven't played the game yet. Do so now and tell us what you think. We really appreciate your feedback and any creative ideas we can steal.
Thank you all for a great time! Now off to play more games.
Play Murder Mitosis: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/murder-mitosis
We're doing this!
We have gotten some amazing feedback on Murder Mitosis these last few weeks, and we have finally decided to turn this into an actual game!
We have set up a Facebook page and of course murdermitosis.com is being redesigned. If you follow us there or on Twitter we will keep you updated on what's going on.
The plan is to redo the entire thing from scratch, since the code got quite messy as the jam-deadline approached. We will also keep the scope rather small for the final product, as local multiplayer games are unfortunately not that great of an investment from a business perspective. We have grown rather fond of our little game and had a lot of fun playing it with friends, so we are dedicated to invest some time into adding new features, rebalancing the gameplay, and adding some more polish.
We have deliberately not touched the Jam-version after the deadline, even though there were a few features we were itching to add. However, I now have a blank project open and a new repository set up and we are ready to give this another go!
What would you like to see added?
We are looking for some more feedback, not on the jam version, but on stuff you would like to see added in a future version. Here's a few things we will definitely add based on feedback we have gotten thus far:
- Control remapping
- This is rather obvious, but there was no time for this during the jam.
- Make Food more visible
- Maybe get rid of the Food altogether and instead have the player regain energy by staying in motion. Once they get stuck between creatures, they will start to die.
- Power Ups
- Perhaps make players stronger, or increase the reach of their conversion attack.
But we want to get the very best out of our little game, so if you have more suggestions, please let us know!
Play Murder Mitosis: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/murder-mitosis
Virtual Reality!
LD 40
Thank you all!
I love Ludum Dare because---in just 72 hours---you get to push yourself from that
to this
all the way to here
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yp1BlSnUG6s
Plus, you get to play all the great stuff other people have put out. Looking forward to the weekend to catch up!
Play our LD40 VR game: Rattletrap VR for HTC Vive, Oculus Rift + Touch (Windows)
Post-Jam Work
We recently began working on a post-jam version of Rattletrap VR to be released soon. There will be bug fixes, some mechanics upgrades, but mostly graphical stuff that we would have liked to finish during the jam.
Here's a first peek at the new canyon
If you have a VR headset and have not tried our jam version yet, go ahead and change that right now!
Follow us on Twitter and on YouTube or on Facebook for more updates!
Got any more of them VR games?!
I just finished playing a first batch of VR jam games. So if you also have access to a VR headset you may want to check out the following VR titles:
If you have developed a VR game yourself, or know of one, please let me know! As a fellow VR developer I am looking forward to checking out as many Ludum Dare VR games as I can.
Of course this wouldn't be complete without a shameless plug of our own VR game: Rattletrap VR
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yp1BlSnUG6s
Play our LD40 VR game: Rattletrap VR for HTC Vive, Oculus Rift + Touch (Windows)
LD 43
Do You Want to Build a Floor Plan?
The office floor plan is done. There are no exits, you say? Hmmmm... 😈
Spoooooky...
Fully furnished and lit.
Work overtime through the zombie apocalypse
Ludum Dare 46
Hive Preserver: Level-Building Breakdown
Since we had a lot of fun writing up a breakdown of our previous jam game, we thought we'd do it again for our current jam game Hive Preserver.
This time we went for full 3D first-person graphics with level design and everything... and I cannot recommend it. Not if you like getting some sleep anyway. It was a lot of work for 72 hours, and as always we had planned to do so much more than we ended up finishing. But on the way we played with some neat techniques that really helped us speed up the level building process a lot.
We decided to go for a retro-vibe early on. It not only fit the game's theme, but would also conceal any lack of detail as just part of the aesthetic. Moreover, it was a style that was very familiar to me from back in the days of modding Half Life games.
The entire level architecture is made up of a very small set of very basic textures. We brainstormed what kinds of materials would be found in such a research facility and landed on very Half-Lifey materials. In the end everything that is not a prop uses one of these six textures:
We deliberately tried to keep them plain (like noise patterns) so they would be more versatile to use. They are not even colored - all the colors in the level architecture are achieved by multiplying these texture with vertex colors.
Starting from a gray grid level layout, we applied the above textures as needed. We then cut further detail into the surfaces - such as the lower halves of the brick walls being painted, or guiding stripes on the ground. By setting these faces' vertex colors, we were able to quickly tint these areas in whatever color we needed. Finally, we added high-contrast lighting to give the level a gloomy feel. Here is an animated step-by-step example:
One additional time-saver was in the UV-mapping. I started by building and unwrapping the first room and hallway by hand, but this quickly became cumbersome when I had to make small changes, like adding a door here or stretching the hallway a little longer. So we shifted to having all textures of the level architecture to be mapped automatically using triplanar texture mapping. This essentially means that the textures are mapped in world space and projected onto the surfaces from each of the three axes/planes:
Using these techniques we could rapidly iterate on the level layout, greatly speeding up development.
You can play the final result here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/hive-preserver
Ludum Dare 48
Hellevator Operator - Movement mechanics and sounds
Trying to nail the movement mechanics and sound design for our elevator game.
Controls are a single button: Hold to move up, or tap to release the elevator into free fall.
https://youtu.be/XO01JK4TpTE
Next steps would be graphics and some actual gameplay...