So my basic concept is to do a top down air combat shooter. The Player’s aircraft has one hard point and no fixed weapons. It’s dangerous to go unarmed, so the player should take this Rocket pod, Machine gun, or Torpedo. Each of these weapons have a very limited use and the player must return frequently to the mother ship to rearm.

Jettisoning the spent weapons pod will improve flight characteristics, but may detract from a limited supply of gear for the mission. I have yet to decide.

Thanks to the wonder of Unity, I have a player and 3 bots flying around four way points. The planes are temporary, but the ground is finalized. I spent 2 hours working on it.

Playable version up at:
http://www.monkeydev.com/unity/ld20/ld20.html

I have been up for 25 hours now (stupid work). I finally implemented the bullet collision and health system. So now I can shoot down bot controlled planes. Playable link is still:

http://www.monkeydev.com/unity/ld20/ld20.html

I am going to catch a few Z’s. When I get up I will make new graphics and get started on the real AI.

When the contest first started I planed to make scripted missions, which now seems like a bit of a waste since I spent most of my time making the engine, and drawing the sprites.

The new plan is to make a random environment and have the player wandering around it killing stuff for money.

I cut all the features that didn’t produce a game. I added a simple menu, high score, and timing system. The last 20 minutes have been me uploading like crazy.

I am very satisfied with this Ludum Dare, and hope to see you all next time.

GG all

Obligatory screen shot:

Contest Link
Web Player Link

Intro:

Air Pirates was developed in a very fluid way, meaning the game I was planning and the game I ended up with varied greatly over the course of development. Many of the game’s features were thrown in at the last minute and not properly tested. However the core components of the game I wrote at the start of the contest were flexible enough to accommodate these wild design changes.

What went Right:

Used a known technology

– I decided to use Unity v2.6 because I been using it for over a year. I knew the names of the native classes and functions that I needed, and how they work. I tried Unity 3 at a friend’s house and I found the slight difference in interface jarring.

Code for reuse

– Many of the classes I wrote in this contest pull double duty, or more. The AirPlane class for example was used for the player, airship, and friendly/ hostile fighters. The texture and performance difference between these objects were implemented via public variables changed in the editor.

Just because I can doesn’t mean I should

– Unity has a terrific feature set including physics, shaders, and animation blending. But to take advantage of these features I would have to sink a great deal of time building 3d assets for them. Instead I went with 2d Sprites attached to a square polygon which always faces the camera.

Using Airplanes

– Airplanes look cool and don’t require animation for their idle, moving and attacking states.

Low rez pixel art

– My art pipe line for the airplanes went as follows: Make a hand drawn sketch on graph paper. Scan sketch and resize it to 128×128. Trace sketch on new layer. Bucket fill with solid colors. Add shade and highlight with color offset. Using a pencil sketch caused me to worry less about exact pixel placement. Using fewer colors gives the game a clean retro look while allowing for palette swaps.

Knowing when to cut my losses

– As you will read in the “What went wrong” section not all the features I wanted made it into the final product. At 6 hours to dead line I decide I should stop messing around with the cool stuff and make a game out of this. Had I continued to dick around I would have release a really cool tech demo instead of a game.

Want went Wrong:

Was too ambitious with original concept

– I have wanted to make a game involving epic battle between airships and airship launched prop fighters for a while. Needless to say the game did not end up like this and I wasted a good amount of time laying the foundation for features that would not be implemented.

Not enough time spent brain storming

– I was writing code less than an hour after the theme was announced. I did not spend much time figuring out what the finished product should look like. I knew I wanted to do something with airplanes and interchangeable weapons pods, and assumed I would figure the rest out as I went along.

Didn’t do long term tests

– I tested my code frequently, but most tests were a few seconds long to make sure the latest feature worked. As such a game breaking bug with the enemy respawn system slipped though. If I had played the game for over a minute I probably would have spotted and fixed this bug.

Didn’t sleep enough before the contest

– The contest started at 7pm on Friday for me. I tried to take a nap after work, but was too excited about the upcoming contest to get any rest. My first night of coding suffered from this.

Didn’t think of the end user experience

– I got too caught up in how much fun I was having implementing the features that I didn’t take into consideration how the game would feel as a whole.

Conclusions:

Using the Unity engine to implement a simple sprite based game saved me a lot of time. Its editor, GUI , and particle features allowed me to make a much more complex game than I would have been able to make from scratch in the time provided. I regret the lack of planning and testing that resulted in the bugs in the final version.

Hello All

My name is Wilson Saunders (aka Hamster mk4). I make games with Unity3d, Blender and GIMP. This will be my second Ludum Dare. Last time I was able to finish a game with good graphics, mediocre game play, and a big game breaking bug. I tried to go for many random elements in the game play. But this made it harder to catch bugs, since it was hard to reproduce the error conditions. This time around I will try for a more scripted game.

Oh one more thing…

I’m in.

Well I wasn’t expecting escape as the theme. I wanted to do something more scripted this Ludum Dare, so I am going to be making rail shooter. Instead of escaping, the player is a prison guard trying to keep the inmates from escaping. So far I have made the code for the player to move along, and done the art for an inmate. If I can get all the code done on the first day, I can use the second day for level design. A boy can dream can’t he?

I have been up for 24 hours now, but I have something playable to show for it. My rail shooter navigation is working. The camera smoothly moves between nodes. Enemies will spawn at when the player reaches certain nodes. They die when you click on them. Once all the enemies are dead the navigator moves to the next node. Unit makes rag doll physics easy.

Here is a screen shot:

Here is a Unity web player link
http://www.monkeydev.com/unity/ld21/Alpha1.html

Last night I finished the level layout and player movement path. Now I am setting the location of the enemies.

Latest Build:
http://www.monkeydev.com/unity/ld21/

Scripting enemies is very time consuming. I am 1/2 way through it, an I may not finish in time.

This has been an odd experience. The main reason I love Game Jams like Ludum Dare is the sense of community I get while reading the blog posts. With the Website errors this Ludum Dare felt really lonely.

I will post a write up later. For now I am just glad to be done.

Unity Web version here:
http://www.monkeydev.com/unity/ld21/

This year I will be participating in the Jam with some people I met through the San Diego Game Developers’ meetup.com. The team name is DormouseDevelopment.

As a warmup I made a little game about kittens and butterflies. It is a 2.5D platform jumper that uses both sprite animation, and 3d animation.

Link

Hello Ludum Dare,

I finally have access to a web cam and would like to submit my ugly mug saying “I’m in.” Who is in charge of the video compilation this time round?

Hello Ludum Dare
This will be my fourth time doing Ludum Dare. I have informed my boss and my wife of my intent to go on a programming binge, and once again they are surprisingly supportive. This time I have recorded an I’m in video and posted it here:
http://www.monkeydev.com/pics/ld24_im_in.mov

Hopefully it makes it in the compilation.

I have nothing but love for all my fellow game developers, lets makes something beautiful.

Tags: i'm in video, im in, video

I know people are concerned about 1000 Kittens being this Ludum Dare’s theme. To me 1000 kittens is not the worst theme on the list, and to prove it here is a list of game ideas involving 1000 kittens I think could be completed in a ludum dare:

Kitten Swarm: Control up to 1000 kittens as they run through the African savanna, use them to overwhelm larger creatures like gazelles, giraffes, rhinos, and hippos so that they can eat and breed more kittens.
Kitten Invasion: Defend you deep space mouse colony from an invasion of alien kittens.
Kitten Rescue: Explore ancient ruins trying to find lost kittens.
Kitten Herder: Be a cowboy on a free range kitten ranch, herd the kittens to areas rich in mice and gofers. Defend the kittens from predators.

The theme I am most afraid of is Curiosity since I can’t think of any game concept I would like to do for that one.

My spin on the theme will be like the first level of spore only instead of a microbe you will control a giant worm in space. I will also not be providing as many customization options as spore, but what do you expect? This is Ludum Dare.

Sadly I don’t think I can work kittens into this game idea.

So far I have done the pixel art for one of the body segments. I have made a script which will animate it. Now I have to join a whole bunch of these together to make a worm.

The first playable Build of my game is here:
http://www.monkeydev.com/unity/ld24/index.html

Not much in the way of game play, but basic user control and character rendering works.

I feel my brain turning off so I switched over to art work. I completed all the sprites for the space worm, here is a screen shot:

playable build is here:
http://www.monkeydev.com/unity/ld24/index.html

Good night