First official Ludum Dare for me (@garethiw) – code and @gredgie – art. We’ll be participating in the Jam for all three days.

Code:  Monogame. We’ll probably be using a small base engine I put together to test Spine with XNA/Monogame. Full source available here. I may also use the XNA gamestate sample available here.

Art/Design: CS6, Spine, Tiled

Sound: BFXR, Audition

Stream: http://www.twitch.tv/garethiw, using XSplit with webcams and some VLC voodoo to get both our screens on-stream.

Timelapse: Possibly a few days after the jam has ended.

Phew! We just made the Jam deadline.

We’re insanely proud of our first Ludum Jam entry. We’d only just decided on a direction for the game at the end of the first day, but it all came together marvellously.

You control Gerde, an alien inhabitant of a homeworld close to extinction. In the spirit (kinda) of the Minimalism theme, Gerde must minimise the number of casualties that occur before her world is flooded. She can do that by taking the shortest path possible through the world.

I won’t give too much more of the game away. It’s a short but exciting adventure.

Ten-minute timelapse of the development of OtherSpace during the 72-hour Jam. As our game didn’t have a soundtrack, I added a commentary (English) track to it instead. Please excuse the “um”s and “er”s, I didn’t plan out a script beforehand!

@gredgie and myself (@garethiw) are in for our second LD, going for all 72 hours of the Jam again.

We’ll be using a voxel engine I’ve been working on which I hope is flexible enough to use for any genre of game, and to fit any theme.

Tools we’ll be using:

• C#/XNA/Monogame
• A voxel sprite editing tool I’ve knocked up
• Photoshop
• Audition
• Caffeine
• Xsplit/Twitch for streaming
• Pizza

Stream will be up at http://twitch.tv/garethiw Friday evening (GMT).

GLHF!

Starting to crash here at the end of day one. Well beyond where I thought we’d be by now, so pretty happy with that!

It’s a cross between Bomberman, Smash TV, and Binding of Isaac – with a heavy influence from the film Cube. Yeah, we don’t know either. Maybe we’ll find out tomorrow!

G’night folks!

Edit: more screens here!

Entitled something like: Going Down (We’ve only got One Parachute!)

It’s taken three goes, but at last I’m actually happy with the outcome of this LD. Myself and fellow jammer Gredgie only really had 48 hours for this jam due to commitments on Monday, so we had from Saturday morning until Sunday evening to wrap up everything bar the most polishiest of polishing.

After waking up to find out the theme, we sat and mused (panicked) for almost a full hour before we struck upon our idea. You’re in a plane, it’s crashing, and there’s only one parachute. We asked ourselves if the theme was too morbid, but then decided that if we just made the game out and out ridiculous, we’d be okay.

So off we went, myself using my familiar environment of C# and Monogame via VS2012, Gredgie sticking with the ever-faithful Photoshop and his Wacom.

We spent the first day designing the plane, using a cut-away internal view and creating a tilemap using Tiled. We put the player in control of the plane’s pilot starting in the cockpit at the front of the plane and with an exit door at the rear. We went for a right to left scroll direction simply because that’s how I was imagining it in my head.

By adding parallax-scrolling clouds in the background, and random camera shake, the scene started to get pretty immersive. Then I had the idea of rotating the plane at random to put it in a nosedive, and to introduce sliding physics in the direction of the slope. All easy stuff to do, but it contributed to the feel greatly.

I took a small amount of code from a previous game to deal with animation using Spine and added the plane’s passengers (one for each of the seats laid out on the map). I then added a simple punch attack that knocks back the player/the AI passengers. The AI was then given four distinct states:

• Panic (default behaviour)
• Attacking/being attacked
• Going for the parachute (when they get close enough)
• Going for the exit (if they have the parachute)

The aim of the game was set ins tone: Grab the parachute, and get to the rear exit. Knock out the plane’s passengers to give yourself time to escape. The AI all follow the same MO.

Day two was all about setting up the intro and outro of the game, and adding as much graphical polish as possible. The game has three possible endings:

• The plane crashes, nobody lives
• One of the AI gets the parachute and opens the door (everyone else is sucked out of the plane and dies)
• The player gets the parachute and opens the door (the player floats to safety while everyone else dies)

On Monday evening, I had a few hours left so I added some beat-em-up style weapons. We ran out of time for Gredgie to finish the graphics before submission though, so the weapons and parachute objects are still pretty much placeholder. That’s the only bit about the game I’m not 100% happy with, but time is time.

Response to the game has been awesome thus far, and now I’m busy keeping up with rating everyone that’s kind enough to leave a comment. I’m pretty chuffed with it to be honest – it’s short, fun and darkly humorous.

Play our game, dammit!

After an extremely successful first year of Ludum participation, @gredgie and myself (@garethiw) are in for our fourth 72-hour LD jam.

Our previous games:

LD28 “Going Down” (10th Overall Jam)

LD27 “Spatium Secondorum Decem” (28th Overall Jam)

LD26 “Other Space” (112th Overall Jam)

Tools we’ll be using:

• C#/Monogame
• My new Monogame-based engine built specifically for jammin’ and available for anyone to use: LDEngine
• ASEprite
• Photoshop
• Audition
• Xsplit/Twitch for streaming

Stream will be up at http://twitch.tv/garethiw Friday evening (GMT).

I look forward to playing everyone’s games!

There’s something here. Hopefully tomorrow it’ll turn into a game!

More of a game now, even if it is just a standard shooter, it’s pretty fun to play. Still lots to do and hard feature cutting decisions to make :[

Congrats to everyone that finished the compo!

And we’re done! Man, this Jam felt harder than any of last year’s. Mentally and physically exhausted, but happy to have a game submitted.

Congrats to all our fellow jammers!

Hey everybody! You might remember us from past LD entries such as Going Down, Get Off My Land or Cervidae.

Our little team has grown over the past couple of years. It started out with myself (code) and Paul (2D art) and grew to include Carl (sound design, code, 3D modelling) and Shaun (music). This was our third jam as a four-person team.

Cathode Way is by far our most ambitious game to-date; where we usually manage to wrap our games up with neat little bows as end-to-end playable experiences, Cathode is more of a "vertical slice" of what could be a pretty cool full game.

I'd had the idea behind the game kicking about for a while: a tiny 2D platformer that exists inside a 3D open world as interconnected but physically separate television screens, each of which shows a small portion of the overall 2D world. It wasn't until we got started that I realised how this simple mechanic could make for some really interesting puzzles.

Usually in a post-mortem, I'd break down how each day went - but I'd rather talk about some elements of the game that made everything come together so well.

Interplay between 2D and 3D worlds: To begin with, while I was experimenting with laying out the overworld (I've never done traditional 3D level design before), Paul went ahead and designed a whole 60-odd screen 2D platform level. It was really good, and the idea was for me to distribute the screens in the overworld to suit the 2D design. However, by the end of day two it became apparent that this wasn't going to work and that we needed to design the layout of both worlds together to create moments where the 2D and 3D elements intertwined instead of feeling totally disparate.

You flick a lever in the 2D world, and a door opens in the 3D world. Go up in the elevator in 2D and you're also going up in 3D too. Get to a "hub" in the 3D world (the fountain courtyard), and the 2D room on that screen is also a hub with 4 possible directions. Racks of screens in the overworld represent a series of connected screens in the 2D world.

Designing the overworld and 2D world in parallel was the key to making Cathode Way work.

Sound design: The first audio in the game was the music. Shaun created a fantastically melancholic theme for the overworld, and an upbeat, exciting track for the platforming sections. But the beauty was that the two tracks are essentially the same piece of music overlaid and crossfaded when you enter and exit screens. It works perfectly, and getting that crossfade in was the first "oh shit!" moment of the jam.

The "ping" sound that Carl designed for when the avatar transitions between screens was also a defining touch. Making sure that the sounds for 2D doors and 3D doors opening/closing were uniquely identifiable. Manipulating the 3D spatial sounds so that you can hear a door opening from far away and still get a general sense of the direction the sound came from.

Then came the Musak-style elevator track that I casually suggested (kinda jokingly) to Shaun about four hours before the Jam ended. He came through with the track just before submission - which is why it didn't appear in the video below which was recorded while I was still frantically bugfixing and polishing. The track makes for a lighthearted moment toward the end of the game.

Those little touches: Implementing the blue beam that represents your avatar transferring between screens while the camera pans to follow was probably the most exciting moment for me. It was the first moment where the separate screens felt like they were connected. The first time it happens, it has an air of mystery about it until you discover what it means.

Putting down grass and trees, fences and paving slabs. Carl came through with the little environmental models that allowed me to start laying out areas that at least feel a little bit natural. It's no The Witness, but I enjoyed laying out the areas.

Colouring all the doors and gates the same. See a red door, and learn that it will open with a lever in the 2D world. This motif would have extended (in my dream "finished" version of Cathode Way) to any object in the 3D world that can be activated.

BUUUUUUUUUUUUUGS: Ugh. This was my first time doing "traditional" 3D world design in Unity. Most of my big Unity projects so far have involved runtime generation of levels, and custom physics. It appears that capsules get stuck in meshcolliders a lot. That's the most common bug here with the first screen in the game - the player gets stuck in the rock that the TV is resting on. Lesson learned - use boxes and spheres in future.

In the video below, you can see how hilariously broken the lift was until I learnt that parenting the character to the lift was probably the way to go. This is fixed in the final build.

One thing that isn't fixed is the most hilariously facepalmingly stupid bug of all; camera culling. While I was setting up the three cameras that are used for projecting the 2D worlds onto the rendertargets for the screens, I forgot to set up culling. I even thought about it while I was doing it - "I must turn on culling for these cameras!". Forgot. That's why the WebGL build runs like ass - the entire world is being rendered either three or four times depending on where you are in the game. I'd fix it, but I didn't realise until well into judging so that's that. You live and learn :)

We hope you enjoy playing Cathode Way - thanks for reading!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JOnT8aKnz-o

Bonus playthrough by Youtuber Blootrix:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNrTtNmVFxs