Made it! I’ve tried participating in LD48 jams a few times before, but this is the first time I managed to get a game wrapped up in the time window.

I was experimenting with Unity3D, it’s my first time really making a whole game in the editor & in 3D, so I had a lot of fun. I picked what I thought would be fairly easy to build, but it was still a massive rush to hit the deadline.

There’s a lot of things I’d have liked to have done better, but the enemy formations and enemies shooting back didn’t make the cut, so the gameplay isn’t as interesting as it could have been. Also, I was adding the sound effects with about 3 minutes to go, I would have tweaked the volume levels and timings slightly. Those are just minor things I would have changed, there was a lot about the game that I’d have liked to have fleshed out more, like the environment and levels and stuff.

I had a blast though, I hope you have fun playing the game:-

It’s called One Star: Should be free – http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-28/?action=preview&uid=27844

You play as an imprisoned star, trying to escape from a bunch of aliens. Control is by the mouse, left button to fire.

You can play it on the web here

The idea of the game is that zombies are climbing up from beneath the earth and you’re trying to push them back down by heaping extra dirt on them.

I haven’t made as much progress as I’d have liked by now. I struggled to settle on an idea on friday, yesterday went quite well, but today hasn’t really been great. I’m still a bit of a beginner with Unity, so I always spend more jamming time than I should trying to figure out basic stuff.

I’d like to add some scoring and sounds, and re-orient the whole thing to landscape. I’m not sure why I went this far in a portrait layout, just habit I guess, but I think it might work better the other way around.

Here’s the link to try the current build.

I’ve switched the game around to work in landscape mode, it’s way better in a web browser now. I also added scoring and simple progressive difficulty.

Switching the orientation was interesting, I’m still not really sure how best to do that in Unity, I guess maybe have a lot of positioning done in scripts? Still, wasn’t too onerous just manually switching it all out, certainly for a game jam. Probably good learning experience for future Unity work.

Play the landscape version

Added sound to the game now, along with minor tweaks and a high score/last score tracker on the title screen. Feels much more like a game, pretty happy overall with it.

Got a few hours left, I think I can take a pass over the programmer art and make slightly better programmer art. Let’s see…

Play the version with sound!

Just uploaded the final (for now) version and submitted to the Jam. Turns out that even slightly less terrible graphics made a big difference. At least it did for me.

Also, since the last build, the machine that pounds the dirt will kill the player, it makes it much more fun.

Here’s my submission entry, and here’s the link to play the game on the web. Thanks for trying it out!

Here’s my jam entry, Planet Hop, it’s a simple one button game where you hop between two planets. I think it turned out kind of fun. The idea probably wasn’t big enough to suck up an entire 3 day game jam, but I had that feeling going into it. I had a few small ideas for this one, but nothing bigger that felt like I could do anything interesting with in 2-3 days… Any more time spent on this will probably just be tuning & polishing.

Play on web