I’m In!

First time, just only recently learned how to use Unity and finished a small game just for fun.

Been working as a Java developer for 10+ years, but will be going with Unity and C# for the Jam, hopefully learning some new stuff along the way.

Wasted much time this morning (UK time) watching It’s always sunny, drinking pimm’s and finishing the warmup project.

At least I should be able to get some hours in before Monday night.

Seeing so many cool (and distracting) screenshots being posted, keep up the great work!

*runs out to buy energy drinks*

Wow, doing the graphics took so much longer than I thought it would. But at least tomorrow will be all coding

Tags: Tiled

I survived my first LD! And I finished on time with all the features I wanted.

Go tiny kraken! GO!

So, I survived last weekend (my first jam) and ended up with a playable game (shameless plug) which seems to have been generally liked (although the feedback on most games seems to be very good and supportive. It’s definitely nice to have supportive feedback, but I slightly worry about people just being nice might make the feedback less useful. I’ll definitely try and turn on anonymous feedback next time, anyone have good/bad experiences with this?)

I managed to play and rate 42 games so far, hopefully I can get this up to at least 80 in the coming week.

I did learn some neat things though:

• When you spend a day in Tiled making a map, you will know it so well that when you get to actually using it in your game engine, that you don’t really consider adding a minimap, arrow pointing to POI, or extra details to guide player to an important part of the map.
• Spending 4-5 hours drawing pixels will actually make me crazy.
• And don’t spawn sharks on top of players, sharks bad!
• There is a lot of people out there also making games for fun, and some of the entries for this LD was really fun to play!

Definitely looking forward to LD34, but until then I’ll keep up with www.onegameamonth.com which I’m sure most people here already know about, and if not, check it out!

Just started my new prototype, voxel turn based game with angry farmers! #screenshotSaturday

 

Stay classy and make more games!

 

Second time around for me, and I will be using Unity and photoshop and maybe pyxelEdit / Voxelshop / blender depending on what I end up making.

Recently made this quite challenging Back To The Future word game as a warmup:

 

Tags: ld34

Spent way too much time today messing around with shaders and tweaking particles and graphics. I’m glad I opted to not do my own modelling and texturing this time.

At least the game is playable and let’s you grow christmas trees and start fires. Tomorrow it’s all about evil snowmen chasing the player + menus and instructions.

Tags: #LD34 #LDJAM #LudumDare #GameDev #IndieDev

So, my first ever post mortem and my second Ludum Dare done.

All in all I’m happy with the game, I wish I could have added some more stuff to do (decorate Christmas trees), maybe improve on the Snowman AI so you could sneak and avoid detection.

Please play and rate the game, would especially like some feedback on the difficulty level.

Tools used

• Unity 3d
• Visual Studio (C#)
• Photoshop

What went well

• Used git from the start this time so I didn’t accidentally mess up my project in the middle of the jam.
• Was able to work a lot with renderers, lights and lightmapping, environment maps and other stuff I’ve not done before.
• Learned a lot about improving performance and discovered the Unity Profiler which is awesome!
• Up one dimension from LD33 (2d game), guess next year I’ll have to go for VR.
• I was fully stocked up on energy drinks and food that was quick to make.

What didn’t go well

• Spent about 5 hours trying to figure out what to make Saturday morning.
• Time management is hard! Finished the last bit (spawning monsters, their AI and the win/lose scenes) just before the deadline.
• As a result of the point above, the instructions were not the best, but I have now changed them.
• Personal hygiene might have suffered
• Like last time, there was no time to have anyone else test the game before releasing it.
• Forgot to add a way to track progress (5 seeds need to be planted), I think was just too blinded by already knowing the level and objective so well.

 

People and instructions

Am I the only person who reads the instructions before playing? It certainly seems like that sometimes 😉

I even had instructions in game, but I guess to many people reading a wall of text is not very enticing:

So I replaced this with a slightly prettier version, hopefully that will help somewhat:

Tags: jam, ld34, Ludum Dare, post-mortem, postmortem, screenshot, unity3d