The idea
We took the time to find an idea, and finally we have one. Let's try. https://twitter.com/lamecaniquedu/status/855784399048257536
La mecanique du plastique
LD 38
Animations and moodboard going on
https://twitter.com/lamecaniquedu/status/855884685448278016 https://twitter.com/lamecaniquedu/status/855885283392450560 And now enjoy some sleep !
Work, don't sleep, work, don't sleep, then work
Happy graphic design https://twitter.com/lamecaniquedu/status/856188931372699650
happy decor creation
Currently creating the scene https://twitter.com/lamecaniquedu/status/856468255740973056
Den
From the bottom of a den, a beast has been released.
Den is an exploration and ambiance game. You control an "half-fox-half cat-half wolf-half lemur-half many things" beast that crept out from its lair. Crawling through a network of tunnels and coming across some smaller and noisy things, it's seeking to reach the outside world.
-LINKS- - WebGL : http://kilosaur.us/8ZKWsr - PC : http://kilosaur.us/rxe299 - Android : http://kilosaur.us/71MAgm
-CONTROLS- - move : clic & drag - scream : clic - hit : long press - quit : alt f4 :)
-ABOUT-
Art, code, original soundtrack and sound effects made from scratch in Paris (in a tiny room) by
La Mécanique du plastique & Kilosaurus / http://lamecaniqueduplastique.fr - http://kilosaurus.com
We're so happy to have been through our first LDJAM ! There would have been a lot to improve, and there is a lot of things that we weren't able to add. The majority of the team coming from a different field than video games, it was an amazing experience to make this thing anyway and we're eager to have some feedbacks.
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-EDIT : BUG FIXES-
- Fixed critical bug : WebGl release css drag issue blocking the character movements.
- Fixed critical bug : final room men dying/no repop.
- Fixed Major bug : two holes in the level colliders breaking the game progress
- Fixed Minor bugs : one not triggered particle system & one SFX was disabled
Den critical bug fixes
We fixed some critical bugs after a (long) sleep.
Thanks for your amazing response !
❤
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/den
Den postmortem #1
So, we did gather everyone from @la-mecanique-du-plastique and @kilosaurus and pile up in a room.
That went right.
As the theme was revealed at 3 A.M. here in Paris and as we wanted to be sure to have a good time, we choose some time ago to do the jam quietly, by installing everything on friday, beginning saturday morning and having long nights of sleep every day after. So once everything powered up and sweets and cakes purchased, we took a few hours on friday evening to discuss about technical and aesthetics envies.
That's when we started to take every one of the 17 themes in competition, in order, and brainstormed on them. Some themes were less inspiring than others, some were subject to debates, but we also defined some gameplays or narrative ideas we were already happy with. But as energy was running out, and confronted to a theme which we didn't liked at all, we decided to stop and go to bed, leaving this last one only blank.
"There's only 1/17 chances of this one being chosen anyway !"
Plot twist : on next morning, theme number 17 is all over the news.
Really not inspired, refusing to do something too literal (that would have been a great path though, we just weren't inspired), we took a tremendous amount of time to find a concept we wanted to explore. We felt all along the way that we were having difficulties to find and construct gameplays. After a while, our best proposal was to focus on the relationship between a solitary human and a giant finger. The player controlling the finger. Mise en abîme, contrast of dimensions and meaningful love-fear relation between the two in order to escape the world boundaries of one or the other. We did explore, slowly, the gameplay possibilities and the LD, but we had a harsh time resolving that, and started to accumulate conceptual issues on inputs, characters movements...
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The knockout was to discover that a game featuring a giant finger interacting in a small world was totally the pitch of Antbassador in LD30. It was already saturday on the afternoon and we still weren't sure to be able to overcome some interrogations so we decided, with difficulty, to simplify by getting rid of some of the atypical aspects of the idea.
The finger became a bit more classical character, the non-verbal relationship became secondary (we even didn't succeeded to go there in the end), we focused on the playable character being too big for its environment, the question about crushing or not the tiny humans... and we throw ourselves into production.
That's what went wrong and resulted in a game opening without so much gameplay. We could have produced a meaningful experience with more time or an experienced workflow, but we didn't have either. We learned a lot instead.
A part of the crew had the experience of making animated films in some weeks. That was crazy. But a game in some days, that was wonderfully insane.
- Den : https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/den
- Postmortem :
- #2 : environment and ambiance
- #3 : pixel art animations
- #4 : the beast, the music and the sound effects
- #5 : Development
Den postmortem # 2 : environment and ambiance
Even before starting on creating Den, from the first day of brainstorming, we choose to step away from our 3D habits and go for pixel art. By lack of a game workflow routine, after a quick moodboard we jumped straight ahead into drawing a complete single illustration of the whole game, without much thinking about props and reusable assets for building the LD.
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When came the time of integrating in Unity, we realized that this method would be pretty risky. Mainly because it meant that the level design wasn't flexible and wouldn't be tested before long. So we stepped back and switched to a LD made in Unity by using spritesheets of rocks with different scales and shapes, used as material to create the paths for the tunnels. It allowed us to allocate tasks more easily to multiple people on the team (that's obvious, but someone could change all the rocks in once by working on the spritesheets while others would work on integrating).
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So something went wrong here, as we were a bit lost on how to manage the balance between fully controlled illustrations and flexible integration, and we lost some time in the process of figuring it out (we still didn't had a practicable LD on the beginning of the last day). It led us in the end to a lack of time to take a second look to the LD, that would have revealed an issue with the clarity of the last puzzle.
But despite this difficulty we were all along able to produce graphic assets without so much trouble and in the end creating the visual atmosphere went pretty right.
- Den : https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/den
- Postmortem :
Den postmortem #3 : pixel art animations
In parallel to illustrating the environment for Den, we had to make little frightened animated men. As we never did pixel art animations in such a short time, we rapidly realized that our habitual creation tools weren't adapted to produce quick rough sprite animations. A quick search lead us to Piskel, a browser-desktop-opensource-freedom app that is probably an obvious tool for a lot of you, but were a amazing discovery for us.
Onion skin, layers, realtime preview, shortcuts, auto color palette, local saves and all-featured imports/exports. It took us a few minutes to embrace it.
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The men animations are 32x32 pixels, in 8 colors. There is three runcycles, an idle, a fall, a fall reception, a cornered idle, a shouted when cornered reaction, a standing up and taping code.
Two tips were used for the runcycle : the arms were separate layers, allowing three quick variations onto one base. And taking advantage of the limited details, only the half of a run cycle is made : the character always use its left foot. It creates a pretty much fluid cycle for 5 frames :)
The implementation were pretty straightforward. Every states are based on a few inputs (mainly velocity, vertical velocity and desired velocity), the runcycles are switched using a randomized parameter on an enter state of a StateMachineBehavior. The run animation speed is connected to the character velocity, which is slightly randomized for every character.
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We often duplicated frames in Piskel in order to have a direct control on the animation structure and rhythm. As a result, the files contains multiple data that could have been stripped away. It wouldn't be the most efficient way to make the spritesheets, but in these time conditions and with the microscopic weight of the animations, doing that way allowed us to integrate the animations in one click, without any retouching in Unity.
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For the head bang animation, for simplification's sake we choose not to animate the recoil by hand but to tween directly the head position, using parametrical animations driven by AnimationCurves. Some missing time for debugging led us to some spectacular dismemberments possibilities in the release.
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- Den : https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/den
- Postmortem :
Den postmortem #4 : the beast, the music and the sound effects
One of the numerous precious things on the team (and that we wanted to use fully on Den) is the possibility to integrate music and sound design as a core ingredient of our creation process, thanks to our Hyper8 wizardry.
The beast
The beast is basically a blend of multiples existing animals, a kind of fox mixed with a shrew or a fluffy wolf with orc teeth. We wanted to achieve something thick and dangerous by its size but also soft as a large teddy bear. As we didn't had time to experiment with soft body physics or skinned meshes, we choose to simply separate its body into independent rigid sprites.
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The scream sound was inspired by the T-rex as we all know it in Jurassic Park. I don’t know if it's made exactly in that way, but something that seems to work very well was the idea to use a different animal for each frequency. Using deep roarings for low frequencies, like lion's ones, and looking for high frequency in something like bats or a pigs screams. To polish the sound and the rhythm I also used a tool that I can easily modulate : my own voice. I screamed like a fool in my microphone and down-pitched that, to make it big and monstrous.
The music
The music needed to emphase the troubling universe of a confined cave, so we built a specific reverb/delay system to create a meaningful echo that have been used for most of the rhythmic elements. Delays and reverbs repeat and spread only the low frequencies, so every time a sound is being heard again he vanishes a bit more into its dark side. It must be a classic recipe of sound treatment in an OST, but it worked very well here !
Keyboard notes and some other sound highlight the dark ambiance. A didgeridoo is used all over the track to bring some more mystery, and resonate with the tribal percussions used in the beat. Some kind of scratching sounds are also bouncing between the right and left channel all along. Note that I was trying to make discreet unsettling screams in the background using lion’s roaring, but it became scratching sounds by accident. A lion’s roaring so fucked up by a chain of treatment that it looks like something scratching on the ground and causing some falling rocks.
The music and the 56 sound effects have been made in the middle of everyone, using one of my dying -but most transportable- keyboard, and integrated without so mutch hastle.
As the music was one of the first thing finalized in this few days, we've all been able to work on drawings, animations, integration and code with the music flowing in our ears and inspiring our hands.
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- Den : https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/den
- Postmortem :
One button !
Hey ! Did you make a one button game ?
What a small world ! We want to try games with minimalist interactions !
LD 41
Second LD Jam completed !!
We're thrilled to have been through our second jam !! You can check our two players versus-fighting-card game Hadecken:
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/$81253
First LD we made Den
And... getting in the coma right now
Hadecken - One Player Mode
In addition to the Two Players mode, Hadecken got One Player and Zero Players modes.
Play without friends ! Look at AIs fighting each other !
So much modes
Got a friend ?
Don't have friends ?
Have no self ?
