Hey guys! I’m in for ludum dare 28. I’m gonna participate the jam with two friends of mine. My first jam ever was SharkJam, I made the game Jesus VS Sharks, and it was pretty fun! I can’t wait to know the theme so we can start having ideas.
We’re gonna use unity, zBrush, Maya, 3dCoat, photoshop, adobe audition and some other software to make our game. We’re probably gonna make all of our stuff, and we’ll not use anything pre-made.
I wish everyone luck!!

On this post i’ll share with you guys our progress.

• December 14th, 00:00 – December 14th, 4:10

Me and my two friends Victor (@victoriousart) and Arthur (@onilolz) decided to make a game where you had to explore random rooms. When you start the game you would be able to get only one of three weapons/items (we still aren’t quite sure about that) to face the following room. The weapon can be perfect for that room, it can be somewhat useful or it can be completely useless!
Upon completing that room you can then choose the item again to explore the next room.
We still need to define some important stuff like level design, some core game design elements and the art style.
They went to bed some hours ago and I kept doing stuff. I was too excited for ludum dare 28 to be able to sleep! They told me that if we rest we can work things out in a better way.

Here’s my timelapse of what I did so far:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7gMmnrMen8&feature=youtu.be

I’m going to bed now. I’ll keep editing this post/commenting with new updates.

• December 14th, 12:00 – December 15th, 5:46

I’ve managed to program a lot of stuff, mostly minor stuff but things that usually I have no time to do. My two friends are making the 3D art, each one is modeling a room of the game.
Today we had some problems, like, one of them got really sick and then he lost his internet connection, and the other one disappeared and is nowhere to be found 😛

In the meantime i’ve managed to make two timelapses! And there’s one more that i’m uploading right now.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iNoppW-gEWA
In this one you can see me still making some basic stuff. I tried to make an enemy, and failed. Then I’ve started making the menu screen. Then i’ve programmed the items you can choose (only one!) before every room.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gp9zfgsN6P8

In this video you can see that I made some soon-to-be things that fire arrows at you. I even managed to make the arrows stick to the player! Made some blood particles and decals with placeholder textures.

Then my friends mysteriously disappeared. I got really boring of programming because I still didn’t see any of the art they’ve made, believe it or not. I decided to make the 2D sprite that we were going to use in the game.
I recorded it all, but when I finished it, I realized that i’ve recorded the wrong screen (the one I wasn’t using) so i’ve lost one of the coolest timelapses I was going to make ): That sucks.
Anyway, i’m uploading another timelapse of me trying to sort out how to work with 2D sprites now that Unity officially suports 2D mechanics. I’ll post it and whatever other timelapses I have on my next post.

Oh, and here are the sprite animations I did from scratch.

• December 15th, 13:00 – December 15th, 23:30

I’ve finally managed to contact one of the artists. He said he’s working on the 3D assets, and that he still doesn’t internet connection.

Before I got news from him, I was panicking, thinking that we wouldn’t be able to put together the mechanics and the art in time. So i’ve made another sprite.
It’s bloodmary!

She’s one of the (hopefuly) two enemies in the game.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYW6KrTjBZ4
In this video you can see me working on the finite state machine for the main character’s animation.
This is so iconic, because it’s the first time ever i’ve messed with Unity’s 2d features.  I’ve made  a very complex FSM but as you can see in the end of the video, I failed terribly.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQsHQYcTuCc
This is my second try with the FSM. It worked! Sort of.
Then I made bloodmary’s sprites. You can see the process and all.

Now i’m going to go back to coding some more stuff. I hope we have time

This time, I didn’t stay up all night after the theme was released. I just tried to put some thought into it, but after a few minutes of not having any idea, I just went to bed. Before sleeping I watched a few youtube videos (I searched “ancient technology” looking for inspiration), until I stumbled upon a video of a wind powered sawmill.

I had a good night’s sleep and on the next morning the idea just came to me: A device made out of bamboo, wood and plant cloth that goes upward using extreme wind force. It was a simple idea… simple enough for me to finish it.

Yeah, it has bugs, of course, but I was able to implement and draw most of the stuff I wanted in the game.

View post on imgur.com

I think what made this possible was a combination of a relatively simple idea + me doing it by myself + choosing jam instead of compo. The problems I faced on my last game jams were:

• Having a team or a paterner, but the team/partner giving up halfway through the jam (this happened the most)
• Doing it alone and not having enough time because I had a somewhat complex idea
• Doing it alone and not having enough time because I chose compo instead of jam

Also, maybe it helps that I have a much greater programming/art knowledge than I had in the past few years.

So yeah, I think this time I got it right, which revigorated the “game jam spirit” that was getting weaker and weaker each time I couldn’t finish a game on ludum dare.

If you want to play my game, here is the link! If you like it or have any criticism or whatever, just leave a comment!