It’s my first time joining Ludum Dare, and I’m pretty psyched. Managed to put something together in the midst of all my end-of-semester assignments.

It’s not much tho, it may just barely act as a proof-of-concept, but I’m pretty satisfied with it (aside from the art, I can barely use photoshop).  Anyway, I’m declaring my tools and code base here:

– Unity 4.3.3.1
– CorelDraw X7 for the assets
– sfxr for the sfx

That’s it. No library, no nothing. The game is pretty simple, so I don’t need anything much. Gonna post the compo submission after this~

Submitted for the compo! The game is called Covered, it’s basically navigating a maze while the maze itself is covered by some kind of surface ~

Alas, I didn’t leave a note for the control in the entry and I have no idea how to edit, so I’ll leave it here:

Arrow Buttons – Move
Space – Peek / Next level(after current level ends) / Restart level (after dying)
Z – Restart level

The entry is HERE.

Hope anybody out there like it. Now on to those unfinished college assignments.

This is my first entry and my first contact with the ludum dare community, and I have to say I’m very surprised (and pleased) with the positive atmosphere of this community. I didn’t really expect all the positive feedbacks, considering that I myself felt like I should’ve done better (more level, yes). But it is an honor and a pleasure to receive such comments.

As for what next, I guess the entry as it is won’t change. I fixed the very minor bug and no other bugs were found (yet). For the game itself, I really want to create more levels, get someone to work on the art, balance it, and publish it somewhere, maybe on this summer break or maybe later. Bottomline is, entering LD 29 really motivated me to go into more serious game development, and for that, I thank you bunch a lot. 😀

My LD31 entry is finished!! It’s called Cyclic Clash and you can find it here.

It’s been several months since my last LD, (I missed 30 because of school works) and so much things have changed. Yea, I know that I’ve been slacking off when I said I’m going to revamp my LD29 entry, but the time will come someday. That idea is still a good idea for me until now. Lots of things happened in between. The biggest maybe is my improvement in terms of creating games, especially with Unity. I got a 3 months internship in an up-and-coming game studio in my city, Arsanesia (http://arsanesia.com). They are cool people, and I’ve leveled up quite a bit because of my internship.

Anyway, about the game. It’s not something I came up recently. The theme this time was quite a let down for me, because it lacks inspiration. Coming up with 0 good idea, I finally decided to just create something I really want to create. Cyclic Clash isn’t that game, actually. It just adapt the system in a very minimal way, but I hope I could get some feedbacks from it. The main idea of the game comes in pondering about Pokemon. Pokemon (and many other games with elements and affinity) is basically a more complex rendition of the classic rock-paper-scissors. It come across my mind though, that in adapting rock-paper-scissor, a lot of these games left out a somewhat fundamental element of rock-paper-scissors. The thing I’m talking about is the short thinking span.

Starting from that I fleshed out an idea of a rock-paper-scissor gameplay with a very limited turn time. Cyclic Clash do this and adds another layer of complexity in form of elements. This, of course is not the entirety of my concept. I’m thinking about lots of things like charged moves, duration, cooldown, status moves, and lots of other interesting stuff. But that will have to wait. For now, do enjoy Cyclic Clash and tell me what you think about it.

In the meantime, I really need to learn to compose some basic BGMs. I’m starting to get the feeling my entries are so stale without them.

Hello there! It’s been about half a day since submission for LD31 ended and I’m still in a state of glee for managing to finish in time (although in a very minimum specs). Since I got nothing better to do (the semester just ended last week), I’m feeling like writing a bit about the development of this entry. After all, this entry holds a specific place in my heart and mind. You can see it here.

The theme for this LD was “Entire Game in One Screen”. Initially I wasn’t very happy with this theme, it’s hardly inspiring for me. Maybe 5 hours after the compo started, I’m still scrambling my head for an idea good enough for the theme. Deciding that it was a lost cause, I then decided just to build one of the game in my concept reservoir that fits the theme. Enter Cyclic Clash a.k.a. Rock-Paper-Scissors on steroid.

Rock

Cyclic Clash was a name decided in the end. The original concept revolves around the idea that affinity-based combat are essentially a variant of the classic rock-paper-scissor.  Lots of games implement the affinity concept so well and become a hit, most notably RPGs. Pokemon is the first one that come to mind.  Growing up with JRPGs, turn-based-battles are something I enjoy, and as a creator, it’s a challenge of mine to contribute something new to the genre.

I realized there’s something missing from the classic Rock-Paper-Scissors concept in most of its video game implementation. Speed is missing. The Final Fantasy Series tries to give this element in the form of ATB (Active Time Battle), and it works. In my opinion though, the original Rock-Paper-Scissor game you played when you decide who will go and buy drinks feels a little bit faster. A little bit more exciting. It was from there I played around with the idea of having a fast rock-paper-scissors in video games.

Paper

It’s a bit of a boring idea though, to just port Rock-Paper-Scissors to the form of a video game. I figures it might needs something to make it a more interesting. Here where elements come in. Elements would add another layer to the gameplay so that it would be a little bit more complex. For Cyclic Clash I stopped right there, but I still have tons of other ideas in my head. A special move that could be executed when your special bar is fully charged is one example I would like to implement next. Other than that there’s a character class to add another layer, a variation of moves instead of regular attacking (full block! status move! damage multiplier! reverse affinity!), also a cooldown with the move, etc. etc.

I believe that it should all roots in the original layers of Rock-Paper-Scissor, of course. As long as you got this layer right, you’ll win.  But more variables would bring more consideration to take upon deciding what to choose. And you have to choose in the span of like, 2 seconds? How exciting (and possibly frustrating, not to mention confusing. But hey, we’ll never know till we try the actual thing :v) is that?

Scissors

The concept in my mind would take form in an RPG. You have a lot of people to form a party. You can pick the move of each person, switching in the middle of the battle to counter your opponent’s moveset. You’ll fight a boss with 10x your health and you need to pick the right moves quickly to win. It would be nice if I could actually arrive at that point in the future.

In this post is the symbol I used for rock, paper, and scissors.  They actually came from the lore in my head. Every creature consists of three main parts: the body, the mind, and the heart. The creation of all creatures are the doings of the three goddesses, the Goddess of Might (rock) creates the body, the Goddess of Wisdom (scissors) creates the mind, and the Goddess of Love (paper) creates the heart. Might defeats Wisdom with its unshakable strength, Wisdom tramples Heart with its cold calculation, and Heart tames Might with its kindness.

Look at me, I’m speaking way too much. Anyway, have a nice day, maybe I’ll write more if I ever get into the mood again.

* if you feel like the symbols kinda resemble a persons hair, that’s because they do. If you are aware of what actually inspires them, then we should be friends lol.