Been over a year since my last LD. I'll heavily lean on Unity for this one.

Other tools: - Blender - Visual studio - Ableton live - SFXR - Tilemancer - Paint.net - Coffee

Got pathfinding working!

https://streamable.com/pp7hx

Going into this theme I was pretty frustrated - it was by far my least favorite theme, and still part of me knew it would probably get picked. I think it even won by a lot?

Anyway, once I got over that, I ended up coming up with an idea I was happy with. Essentially a split-attention game where one hand controls an RTS and the other hand controls an action character.

Game entry: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/placeholder-ld41

Overall I'm happy with the idea, but spent WAYYY too much time in rabbit holes like sprite editing and UI polish. I have a lot more things on my todo list I would have liked to flesh this out with, but I finished!

Excited for this one. Most likely going to be using Unity, and maybe Tilemancer which is a sweet tool I recently discovered, if I'm doing 2D stuff.

And, new cozy setup!

Collapsed last night after finishing my compo entry so I forgot to make a blog post.

I made a 3D puzzle game where you control multiple characters at once to position them correctly in order to proceed, and in some cases you need to kill/sacrifice one or more. Here's a screenshot:

I found that on the first day I ended up wasting a lot of time getting the look right. I was trying to go for the low-res PS1 look (think devil daggers) with lots of 64x64 textures made in Tilemancer, and some custom shaders.

I ended up hating how that looked and went with an extremely simple minimal style with emissive elements. I think it ended up looking a bit better and was way less work.

Also, this was the first time I didn't use SFXR for all my sound effects. I was tired of everything always sounding 8bit and felt it didn't match the visual style at all. So I tried using various VSTs in Ableton Live to generate sound effects instead.

Try the game out here!

Super excited for this one.

All i have is movement mechanics and tile placement:

Woke up this morning ready to give up cause I wasn't too excited about the idea. But I'm gonna press on! I feel like this happens to me every single time.

Ever since reading this article about procedural generation a while back I'd been keen to try doing something with it in unity.

The system is extremely simple: Create a bunch of room pieces with connection points, randomly iterate through room pieces with different orientations to try to snap them to each connection point.

"Start with nothing" seemed like a good enough theme to apply it to.

It got a lot more complex once I added a pathfinding system that needs to update while the player moves around. I ended up finding a sweetspot between the total pathfinding grid size and the frequency of updates, though its still a bit buggy unfortunately.

You can play the final game here. I'd appreciate any feedback!

My first LD was exactly 10 years ago April 2012!

Missed the last couple of years but I'm excited to jump back in :)

Not been feeling 100% lately so I wasn't thinking of entering but I had an idea today I really liked so I'm gonna go for it.

Good luck to everyone!

Wow, I'm exhausted, as always! I'm happy to be done and I'm pretty happy with the result, too.

I learned several things this go around but the biggest takeaway was to be more self-aware when I'm going into rabbit holes and try to time-box work on certain features.

I spent the entire first 24 hours not touching code and just working on assets and visual components. I don't know how to model trees, so I decided to follow a tutorial in implementing a procedural tree generator in blender. The results are decent looking:

But the graph is a bit of a nightmare...

The tutorial is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WLym7frkpKM

In the end, i only generated 4 trees and a bush to use for the game. So while it was a great experience learning more about Blender geometry nodes, it was definitely a huge rabbit hole time sink.

I also spent way too long on the grass! Initially I tried a typical approach of quads and a simple drawn grass texture. But I didn't like the result of this as grass was too sparse, and increasing the density resulted in poor performance:

After a few other attempts, I ended up settling on a GPU instanced solution, based off of the code here: https://github.com/utkaka/unity-gpu-instanced-grass

The strategy is to bake the grass blade positions before runtime by raycasting all over the scene and saving ground contact positions into a giant array. This array is chunked up into multiple renderers which send the positions to the GPU in a ComputeBuffer, they don't need to change during runtime. The shader has a simple noise-based wind effect on it.

And the result is....Cool looking, but nothing like grass. It looks like weird tentacles!

Another rabbit hole, I learned a lot about various ways of rendering grass, and I got it to run smoothly, but it was absolutely over time-budget since it wasn't critical to the final game.

In the end, I ended up taking an extra day to finish the game and get it submitted to the jam category: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/53/skypost