Hrrm. Interestingly, whilst f5’ing for the contest theme to be revealed, I was in the middle of starting a re-read of The Seventh Tower, a series I remember fondly from when I was younger. I had just gotten to the third or fourth chapter in which the main character, Tal, tries to see the Empress of his country. He is stopped by the Imperial Guard, who scoff at one of his lowly stature daring to demand an audience, and offer him a chance to see her by playing them at an ancient cardgame.

This game, Beast-maker, seems to fit the theme perfectly. Out of a 100-card deck, each player is dealt seven cards, each with a fantastic beast pictured. The card may then be placed in one of seven slots: Head, Heart, Temper, Skin, Speed, Strength, and Special. Once all the cards are placed, a creature is created with the defined elements from each creature decided: Skin of a Troll, Strength of a Giant, etc etc. The creatures then battle, and the owner of the last beast standing wins.

At first I wondered if I would just emulate that game, which would allow for creation of a deep a game as possible (being graphically mild as a card game), but not much context (nor visuals, no way am I going to basically tackle Spore in 48 hours). I then figured, why not pull the game out of an abstracted card game and have the player control this creature directly. I imagine something like a simple Pokemon-style game, pitting your creature against various others, which, upon defeat, can be absorbed and their traits allotted to one of the stats. To simplify the game, I reduced the number of stats down to four (Skin, Size[or perhaps Strength], Speed, and Special). After doodling some kid in the style of Limbo, having woken up on an island in the middle of nowhere with a blob next to him, the stage is set.

I’m willing to bet I’ve overextended myself on the design, but so it goes. To the coding!

Spent some time last night with the girlfriend and some buddies. I wouldn’t count the time entirely wasted, since I tossed my concept around a bit with them and it seems to be approachable enough. Got myself a couple of cases of mountain dew and I’m ready to fire on all cylinders. Getting the engine set up will be task number one; I’m working on a game myself so this is a good opportunity to write a simple version from scratch as a bit of complexity stress-test. To code!

So now I’ve gotten the engine for this game, working title Evolution (hurr durr) at the same level as my other project.  Here it is rendering a blank screen atm:

As you can see, I’m going with Java for this project.

Wellp, this is unfortunate, but I’m going to go ahead and declare my forfeiture. Time simply conspired against me, but I don’t count this time I did spend as lost! I got to find a few bugs in my current engine and reignited a spark that’s been lost for some time. Next time, though, Ludum Dare, I’ll have an open sourced engine ready to go, and I’m gonna come knocking. Peace!

Turns out I have the weekend off. I guess I’ll spend it doing Ludum Dare. 😀

Going to be C# in Unity. Probably 2D, using assets I already have, hopefully (so go, snowman, go!). Still, looking forward to doing it regardless.

So at the fall of our beloved ☃, myself and my partner could not come up with a solid game idea soley off of the theme “Entire Game on One Screen”, which I think is not a theme but a technical limitation. As I’ve stated on Twitter, this does not influence one’s idea, just how it is presented, which in my opinion does not improve the jam.

That said, we decided to essentially go with the theme of ☃ anyway, while accepting the limitation of keeping everything on the one screen. While searching for inspiration, my partner found a screenshot from a game named Nox Timore, which piqued his interest. We haven’t played the game itself, but that image gave my partner the idea to have a Slender-esque game of a protagonist stuck in a forest, beset on all sides by advancing snowmen. They can only be fended off by throwing snowballs, which require the player to look down to collect.

I’m not a huge fan of horror or horror-esque games myself, but as we discussed it a slightly different design grew, with influence from the limited movement and actions of Five Nights at Freddy’s. Our protagonist is now at an abandoned Christmas tree lot, being hunted by the snowmen as they slowly advance on the player’s position. They dart behind obstacles and can only be clearly seen (and slowed) by turning on rows of christmas lights, similar to the door lights in Freddy’s:

The player must still gather snow to make snowballs, but while doing so takes his hand off the light switch, plunging the entire lot into darkness. While I’m still not entirely sold on the horror concept, I think this might have enough strategy to still be fun and engaging. We’ve laid out the scene similarly to the concept art as shown below:

The green blocks will be trees which the snowmen hide behind. Gameplay should be possible in the next few hours here, wish us luck!

Got our tree, posts, and section lights set up! The lights will each be turned on exclusively, meaning you can only see the snowmen moving under one section at a time. If you want to scoop up a snowball, you have to take your hand off the switch–leaving everything in darkness. This is all very bright and cheery now, but one partner has been working on the shaders while another has been coming up with appropriate music. For reference, this is what it looked like a few hours ago with placeholders:

Finally have all the models done. Snowman is here to give warm hugs and chew bubblegum, and he’s allll outta gum…

Got a bunch of audio from freesound.org. Audio samples are trivial to play in Unity, so a little bit of research here will go a long way.

Finally some atmosphere! Starting work on the snowman spawning/movement, and when you put the light controls in with the snowfall, etc, you start to get just a little creepier:

Kinda glad we’re entering the Jam. We’ll probably be mostly done today, but it’s nice having a whole day to fix things if they come up.

Tags: 3spooky5me

My partner has all the manual controls working as far as changing lights and firing snowballs, and I’ve been getting the snowman spawning and running/hiding working. Will you be able to defend yourself from the onslaught?

I really am proud of what we’ve managed to accomplish over the course of two days for the LD Jam:

It’s even better with all the sounds! Seriously looking forward to releasing it tomorrow for everyone to try.

Follow @teltura for more updates as they come!

Snowman’s Revenge is finally finished! Throw snowballs to make vengeful snowmen explode. Page is up here.

I’m surprised we got as much in as we did. If we could do it over again, we’d probably get a basic version of the gameplay done first, as we really did spend too much time on the art, etc. It came out alright, though. Maybe it’s a bit hard, but what’s wrong with that? Anyway, feedback is totally welcome, we’d love to hear what people think.

Just wanted to show off what exploding snowmen look like, as this was implemented literally 10 minutes before the deadline:

WebM version here.

Like what you see? Check out the game here!

So we submitted Snowman’s Revenge yesterday but haven’t actually heard from anyone that’s beaten it. I know for a fact that at least two people have made it to 5 o’clock (the game ends at 6), but has anyone actually made it further? One whole internet to the person that does!

Finally have an idea that’s approachable, I think. My first idea was basically Metal Slug meets Hello Kitty; think a big burly military sidescrolling shooter, using teddy bears and rainbows to distract rather than kill your enemy. I was going to combine the cutsey part with nonstandard shooting style, a two-for-two under the “unconventional weapon” part.

I started to make some assets and play around within a previously-existing game that I’ve made, and it became increasingly obvious that to even do anything with this idea, it was going to need a high amount of graphical fidelity, and I wasn’t going to make that within the time limit. (For what it’s worth, I found an awesome gun-building app that I will definitely be using in the future. Made this in like ten minutes, it’s pretty neat.)

It bugs me when themes like this are chosen; rather than informing the mechanics they inform the aesthetics; can anyone make a game using this theme with just boxes and spheres? It’d be pretty difficult, I think, because for something to be unconventional it has to break conventions, and with “weapon” being in the theme that means “build a combat-based game and replace the sword with a spoon” or something similar.

Well, anyway, vent over. I set a timer for five minutes and thought about the theme and how it could be interpreted. Thinking about “unconventional”, it occurred to me that there’s a few different ways to look at something being called “unconventional”: it could mean something unrelated being introduced to a process (spoon for sword), or, it could mean using something way out of its own context (using a sword on a cooking show).

Thinking about it, I think I’m going to go with this loose second interpretation: introducing weapons into something that doesn’t normally have them. In this case, I’m thinking that America’s Pastime needs a bit of sprucing up…

So a lot of people, from a quick glance at other blogs, seem to be taking this from a more philosophical perspective. You, the knight in shining armour, are such a piece of crap for killing all those defenseless monsters. Doctor Frankenstein is the real monster, guys!

K, this works for some things. Not for a 72 hour jam, I think. If you’ve got a good story you want to tell, then by all means, but there’s not much room to write a story, much less develop one here.

So I’m going to interpret “monster” as “mook” or “minion”. Goombas are monsters, the Covenant are monsters, all those things you end up killing in games are the “monsters” that now You are. I’m thinking of building a dungeon-crawling roguelike in reverse–no fancy shmancy plot twists here, you’re just the boss waiting for the hero to finish killing everything, and so you’re throwing monsters at him at key points to soften him up before your climactic battle. I’m thinking Zelda meets Nethack meets Boss Monster–or should I say Ganon meets Moloch meets Boss Monster?

Last time I worked on Ludum Dare, I ran with the first idea that seemed workable, and it wasn’t until halfway through that I realized it was a dumb idea, somehow both too lofty and too lazy. This time I discussed my idea thoroughly with several friends individually last night, typed up some ideas, and then slept on it.

Now that I’m awake, the idea still seems sound, and I’m much more confident that I can have something possible and working done by Monday.

After poking around, I found OpenGameArt’s LPC project to be most helpful for most of the art I’m going to need for my 2D Zelda-esque dungeon crawler. One major set of setpieces are the bosses, though; your standard dungeon fare: dragons, ogres, necromancers, etc, and I don’t have time to work on them myself and no artist attached to this project yet. Anyone willing to help on this aspect? Perhaps one of you artists that can’t put in as much time as they’d like?

Progress! So my game is going to be an RTS-lite, in the setting of a Zelda-esque top-down action title. You are the middle management hired to bring a standard evil dungeon up to profitability, mostly by keeping those pesky heroes from constantly liberating all of your–excuse me, your new boss’s–various magical MacGuffins. You must manage your resources, keep your minions employees from going on strike, and, of course, eliminate would-be heroes with great prejudice.

Here you can see the tile detection chugging along; you’ll be able to put some traps or generators on the ground, and other traps embedded in the walls. Also shown is one of the fantastic LPC Sprites controlled with wasd, courtesy of Open Game Art.

So yeah. I’m real optimistic, just have to keep chugging along.

So, I can place buildings, I can spawn creatures. The deadline is looming, but hopefully these last 24 hours will be my most productive. I think something at least resembling a game will come out of this.