Hello Ludum Dare, I’m in!

I’ve done game jams in the past, and watched the last miniLD with envy, so I’m going to see about taking part in LD #22.

Platform: iPhone.
Code: iPhone SDK, Objective-C.
Graphics: SpriteSomething (on iPad), Pixelmator. (SketchUp if I need 3D graphics.)
Audio: GarageBand (iPad/Mac), Audacity, sfxr.

This is the set up I'll be using for Ludum Dare 22.

Spent some time making a nice, responsive character creator.


Next up is finishing the different sprites, then creating the mini games that our lone reporter will be dealing with!

I’ve lost quite a bit of time to the creation of stat tables for the various activities one can do in my game. Since I’m using real world locations and MKMapView, hopefully my progress will speed up now that the tables are mostly implemented.

The game can now be played all the way through, and either won or lost. All the character stats, money, and objectives are achievable. Here’s a screenshot of the “daily summary” that tracks your progress:

Yes…! I had to stitch up a few unfinished things, but the app was completed and uploaded during Submission Hour.

If you have an iPhone, iPod touch, or can use the iPhone Simulator, give it a whirl:
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=rate&uid=4720

It took a few tries in Motion to upload to YouTube properly, but without further ado, here’s my timelapse for the creation of The Travel Section, with a postmortem after the link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xhNemclQU7s

So, what went right:

• Sticking to UIKit was a great idea, as it let me visually design my interface and make sure it was going to come out right on the first try.
• SpriteSomething on iPad was super-useful for making pixel art.

And of course, what went wrong:

• I totally misused UIStoryboard in my first pass of the app. If I had done just a touch more reading before I started, I wouldn’t have lost five or so hours near the end of the compo.
• CoreAnimation isn’t for games. I had four or five hours to make my minigames near the end, and if I had stuck to basic NSTimer and manual animation at the start, I probably could have done three or four of them in the time it took me to do just one on the second try.

So, that was my Ludum Dare 22! It was a tough experience, taught me a lot, and was quite a bit of fun. Hope you enjoy the game, if you happen to put it on your iPhone/iPod!

Although I will be busy with the Cherry Blossom Festival this weekend, I’m counting on all of YOU to make some awesome games.

And if you make something in GameSalad…tell the world! We make available a couple of “badges” that you can put on your game’s materials to show that it was Made With GameSalad. Here they are:

You can also get these images and more by checking out our page on Facebook.

My wife and I will be participating in the Jam. I’ll be using Unity, Sprite Something, GarageBand and any other tools I need to get my game off the ground, my wife will be contributing her art skills and will use either Adobe Illustrator or Autodesk Sketchbook Pro.

Cheers! Good luck!

We took our time brainstorming, since we’re going to be making a pretty simple game. We’ve decided on doing a “ring toss” game in the style of the old Tomy Waterfuls toys.

So…we’re off to it!

I’ll be using Unity, targeting iPad. Looking forward to it!

The themes I like the most so far are “10 Seconds,” “Connections,” and “Surveillance.” Hoping that one of those gets picked.

I told my brother-in-law “if the winning theme is ’10 Seconds,’ I want to do some sort of trivial fighting game.”

So…here we are, and I’m trying to think of the best sort of fighting game mechanics that could be crammed into a ten-second round.

Divekick‘s rounds are twenty seconds long, and I think it would still be pretty fun if they were only ten seconds long.

Decisions…

Okay, I decided I’d like to make a game focusing on that one pitfall of Street Fighter matches, the fireball spamming fight! The players will have very low health, like Divekick, and rounds will be ten seconds long.

I’m still a relative Unity beginner, so as I play around with the gameplay systems, I’m spending a lot of time getting to know APIs that I haven’t used before.

In this case, it works with my Logitech USB game controller, as well. Fun stuff!

Well, I lost a few hours to making my collision work. It all happened because I wanted to drive my GameObjects exclusively on my own, and not depend on the PhysX engine.

The relevant Unity physics documentation page that explains how to make this work is a little more obscure than you’d expect at first, but if you’re making a Unity game where 1) You’re not using the PhysX engine and 2) You want to detect collisions, then here’s what you need to do:

• Give rigidbodies to all your colliders.
• On those rigidbodies, set isKinematic to true.
• On the collider, set isTrigger to True.
• Detect collisions in the trigger functions, OnTriggerXXX(), not OnCollisionXXX().

That’s it! I’m happy I figured this out during a Ludum Dare, and not on a more important project, but either way I’m glad I know what to do next time.

I beat my head against the wall for a while figuring out shaders and collisions. As you might tell from the GIF, I figured out only one of those.

Anyway, I also have a hard 10-second limit now, and two people can play at once (Keyboard and Joystick). This is a good starting point for me to seal things up tomorrow.

Another Unity/C# feature (Coroutines) sucked up a couple hours of concentration, but my game finally has a complete loop…!

So, this has winning, losing, and a complete game loop; this is something I could submit. Of course, it’s not that impressive yet, so the goal is to just add polish and other small features until submission time.

Woo! Second successful Ludum Dare (my first was LD22).

Yay! My game is far from the best, but I finished it within 48 hours, and learned a lot about Unity in the process.

So, Firespam is a fighting game where your only move is to throw a fireball, and the rounds are ten seconds long.

brb, going to go fall asleep.

I’m in for LD28, will be using Unity, specifically the new 2D tools.