Friend of mine mentioned Ludum Dare’s October contest and I blogged about it. I found the idea of completing *and selling* challenging and most interesting. I stepped in the bandwagon on 22nd day, so it’s bit over one week time for me to do the game.

I chose to put together a tactical game. It is turn-based, features hopefully interesting decisions. And there’s some zombie dwarves. Add some pixel art by me and I believe I have a great mix together.

I have managed to complete several key features (couple of dwarves, simple cutscene/dialogue system, enemy apperance, taking actions and such). There’s still much to do (handling game loop, entering new locations, spawning enemies, dwarf art and such) but I’m confident that this will be just fine.

Since the challenge is also about *selling a copy*, I decided that I would put the game on sale right away. I wrote a pre-order blog post and see if people are willing to support this. I put the price tag $1 to the game knewing that paypal will take most of it, and the tax man rest, but at least it’s what this contest was about.

Will report more later.

So it begun…

My Ludum Dare jam entry: The Selene Project

Youtube short teaser video

One of the ideas I have had for ages was a game about meaningful choices… choices that would have real impact. I started mulling over ideas and eventually landed with the concept where player needs to think what kind of society he wishes to build.

I tried to remain supportive: whichever choices player would make, she would be understood. I kept questions prettyedgy and gave “only Yes/No answers” on purpose. I wanted player to think on which side she is leaning into, and make her pick based on that. I mulled over thinking if there should be “maybe” or “no comment” choices but eventually decided to simply keep it Yes/No and then have some confirming questions to test if player really thinks that way.

It was also in my hopes to provide some questions that might get people to think their own behavior in our real, existing world.

Naturally I had grand plans about sooo many different endings, but at least there’s a few really different ones available. Due time limitations I had to decide what would be really important and this left me with 3 layers: there’s 2 totally different paths, then one of these paths has several generic outcomes depending on what you choose and eventually there’s additional layer that can be reached only by providing 4-5 very specific answers.

I’m pretty proud of the project I did. The time schedule was soooo challenging… but I reached all my goals so I’m very happy about this (game concept, story, meaningful questions, voice acting, different endings, and some pretty nice space environment — and most importantly: people seem to enjoy the game).

Currently working on a jam entry. It’s a game where you are on an island, alone and need to figure out how to survive & get away. The most important thing is to remain under the shade… here’s my shelter in progress:

Currently getting the shelter building mechanics in place. The idea is that you need to build a roof or something that gets you under the shade. Otherwise you lose too much energy and will perish.

And yeh, at survival situation you gotta use the materials you have. Such as a boat.

It might not be beatiful, but at least it’s mine.

My ludum dare jam entry Under The Shade was about building a shade and getting a signal fire built. Like perhaps every participant…, I too had huge plans on what I wanted to have in the mini game.

This wasn’t working so well…

With big plans in my todo list… I saw I couldn’t get everything done. I chose certain key things (like shelter building, fire building, hacking wood and so on) and get them done (well enough for playing). The end result is an actual mini-game: you can get a higher score by building a nice shelter (that provides shade)… and the game ends when you build a big enough signal fire. It’s nowhere near where I wanted to be, but it’s OK.

The turning point was when on Sunday I was so exhausted that I just slept between 21-24… and woke up in the middle of the night. I thought.. “man, I’m so tired, I just want to sleep…” but then decided to work “one more hour”. At 2:30 am (Finnish time) I was ready, couple of hours before the final deadline.

The crucial last couple of hours helped me to get the thing done, release the game. I feel that was a hugely important achievement for me: to finish & submit the entry. Without that last hour push, my work would have not been here to rate.

I survived the contest, and it was fun time so I consider this one a successful survival scenario.

Those interested: I posted a youtube video moment ago just in case you have a minute to check out bits of gameplay.

My Ludum dare this time was different from any previous entry. Earlier I had pretty clear ideas about the outcome, each theme was suited for me… but this time…. this time my 72 hour jam went pretty differently. Here’s some thoughts.

Day 1: “I think I just start drawing some pixel dudes”

• Realize the theme Connected Worlds gives me zero ideas
• Mind blank. Resort to plan B.
• Plan B: draw pixel vikings with a mighty beard
• Pretend that the theme is “Isolated” and start developing a survival game !!! POST-MORTEM REFLECTION: THIS WAS THE MOST IMPORTANT STEP. I WOULD NOT HAVE AN LD48 JAM ENTRY IF I HADN’T STARTED WORKING ON SOMETHING !!!
• Realize vikings don’t live on an isle. They will live in a woods. Now. They want to build a settlement, a viking long house. For some reason.
• Get some ideas about the gameplay mechanics.
• Draw more pixel vikings and stones and whatnot.

Day 2: “I think I need to start coding…”

• Read bit of viking mythology, realize that Midgård and Valhalla would be good… realize that drawing new art has a great impact on where this game is going
• Work on mechanics: building, characters, long term goals (viking house), short term aid (food). Plan conflict (Valhalla creatures could attack them…?)
• Start writing code (it was very strange that I started writing code on the second day, I drew art and planned the concept the whole first day and half of the second day or so.)

Day 3: “Leeeeeeeeeeeeeerrrrrrrrrrrrroooooooooooooooooooooyyyyy!!!”

• Concept is clear: Vikings want to build a long house settlement. They will encounter conflicts, bad weather and valhalla creatures. They will need to mine raw resources (wood, stone) and turn them into tools, buildings.
• Realize there’s no way all that can fit in
• Go on full LEEEEEEEEROOOOOY mode and get all the most important items in.
• Cut features.
• Forget UI. For example, selecting the “next item to build” was done using key E. I thought about that for like 2 seconds.
• Cut more features. Write code. Draw viking move animations. Finish strong.
• Who cares that Class instance of CameraHolder keeps track on resources which BuildingObject asks after receiving a message from some 3rd connected object. Also: Characters are now items too.
• Skip in-game instructions. Skip testing. Hope scoring works.
• SUBMIT THE ENTRY!

…and realize that right mouse click opens a context menu. That’s a pretty bad idea when right click is supposed to command the selected character.

But at least it’s done. I couldn’t get Valhalla creatures, nor bad weather, nor ice giants in… but it’s playable. Has goals. Some thinking. And those mighty bearded vikings.

And the most important step was to start working on something.

If you wanna try out my LD jam entry “Midgord Vikings”, feel free to play the web version or download here. If you have time, please test & comment. Thanks for reading.

I posted some thoughts about the LD48 midgord vikings blog post. It’s pretty cool how adjusting simple things (like character controls), the game becomes much more playable. In the original version, it’s clear that scrolling the screen is a problematic. I made changes so that you move only one character, and camera moves alongside.

That alone makes the movement much better.

No post compo version available yet, but feel free to try out the original jam entry: available here.

It’s pretty decent alone…

…but there’s something really great in chopping snowmen with a buddy. If you try out Limberjacks, I warmly recommend getting somebody to help you out.

That was the question I posed to myself when I entered LD31.

It’s interesting how much more fun a game can be if you play with a buddy. Here’s a GIF showing me playing alone. It’s not too bad but… well, I wouldn’t play the game many times.

Alone it’s almost just “running around whacking as much as you can” but with two people… it’s still whacking and running around as much as you can, but it becomes much more fun. I could help the other guy (or girl), she could run away and trick some snowmen to target her while I maneuver around snowmen and use the mighty axe to chop em half.

Here’s a GIF about a multiplayer game. (click the image to view the animation)

Even with a random stranger who just happened to appear to the same playroom, the game felt different.

My Limberjacks entry is million light years far away to be considered a game, but it’s a pretty decent attempt on doing barebones version of an online multiplayer game. It’s enough to test the concept.

And at least that much seems to be doable in 72 hours.

My Limberjacks entry needed sounds, and I thought that “winter forest needs some wind sound”. How to make such? I grabbed four almost-free tools of mine to help get the job done:

* My Samsung Galaxy S3 (cheap)
* Smart Voice Recorder app (free)
* Audacity (free)
* My mouth (free)

I start blowing very gently towards the screen (not towards the microphone, since that would just create noise). I didn’t blow directly to the microphone, and my mouth was above the screen. After recording the audio (making sure the quality of recording is highest possible) I copied the files to my computer and tweaked them in Audacity (basically, cut off the clip and might have slightly reduced the noise if necessary).

After that, the job was done: your cheap-as-hell background wind sound is finished.

Yes, it sounds crap if you compare it to… well, almost to anything BUT there’s one advantage: it’s still much better than no sound at all. Just by spending few minutes on this, I have enhanced the game experience. Now it kind of emphasis the cold winter scene. Having any small sounds can make a big difference.

Or, at least a little difference in a game JAM like ludum dare.

To check it out, here’s the Limberjacks entry.

When the snowman theme was going strong, I thought it was pretty lame or… well, something that didn’t feel right. I drew this to express my thoughts:

I wanted anything but snowman.

But… once the real winner was announced “Entire game on one screen”, it hit me that “snowman” is actually a great theme compared to the winning theme. In this light, “Snowman” theme had some potential, but this new theme was not… such a real theme to me. I still don’t quite understand the theme nor have seen (yet) a super unexpected/creative/innovative way to handle it in any of the entries.

So I did what I always do in ludum dares: ignore the theme and do whatever I want.

And “snowman” theme was lurking there in the shadows. And that thought grew… and here’s what I came up with:

I put together an online multiplayer game in less than 72 hours. Plenty of axe hitting. Plenty of melting snow. Plenty of nasty snowmen.

Eventually the entire screen was filled with snowmen who try to bite off your head.

That’s what snowmen do.

You can play Limberjacks here (invite a buddy to play the game for optimal experience)

Thank you snowman. You saved my ludum dare.

I just leave these here. Click images to view GIFs.