After missing LD29 and LD30, I’m back for LD31.  Even if I don’t have to post to partake, I’m doing so anyway!  I’m joining the jam, not the compo, because I’m not very good at following rules.  I’ve been browsing other people’s posts for ideas on tools, and for wallpapers, so here is my list of tools:

Sound:
– Bosca Ceoil
– BFXR
– Audacity

Graphics:
– Sculptris
– Blender
– Tilen
– Gimp
– Paint 2
– Scratch (I have used this for graphics before…  Paint.NET doesn’t work on my mac.)

Engine: Unity3d NotPro 4.6
Language: C#

Source Control: Git
Screen Timelapse Capture: Looking for recommendations!  Otherwise will write little script to so.

Also I have been looking at various websites for audio and graphics assets, including

– http://opengameart.org/
– http://abundant-music.com/
– http://www.fakemusicgenerator.com/
– http://abundant-music.com/
– http://zielak.pl/pub/github/pixel-sprite-generator/

No guarantees that I use any of what I wrote down here, because as I said, I’m not very good at following rules.

And one more thing to say!  Don’t forget to vote kittens!

I have a title screen, and a level (this theme removes the desire for multiple levels), and the player movement works, and the cat properly snubs you.  There is some additional placeholder art if you look closely enough.  I think that’s it for tonight, I’m going to bed.

I’ll be at a local meetup for the first time since Ludum Dare 28, and so I hope that means I complete a game!  I am putting up my scoreboard made with ImageMagick.  (I should figure out how to make this fancier looking.)

I will be in the jam, I might even have a team, so we will see what happens.

The Corvallis Game Developer Group will be doing presentations showing off our games (two or three games, hey, we aren’t a huge group!  sorry) at 9PM Pacific time.  I was crazy and said I’d set up my laptop to stream them.  We used to do this at the MADE and I’ll dust off the old Twitch account and stick it in the sidebar and maybe we’ll get someone to watch us!

Come watch us so my effort is not wasted!

If you are in the lovely town of Corvallis, Oregon, or perhaps near it, or just willing to go there since I don't know of any meetup in Portland, come join us! We will meet upstairs from Market Of Choice (yes we will meet in a supermarket, they have a lovely conference room upstairs) on Friday evening, but we don't have the room reserved all weekend, so likely on Friday we will discuss where to meet for Saturday and Sunday.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/CorvallisGameDevs/permalink/902683806537667/

There should exist a meetup link but the person in charge of facebook is not the same person in charge of meetup.

In addition to that, is the person in charge of the list of real world meetups, can they point me to where I should be posting this?

And after I said all that, I'm in! Will probably use Unity and the same old tools I always do, but who knows, I haven't made a game in Matlab or R yet. Maybe I'll surprise you!

Minimal games can be good if they are done well, but haven't we already tried minimalism already?

LD11: Minimalist LD26: Minimalism

Once upon a time I would have upvoted this, figuring a minimal game would be less work than a game with lots of detail, but now I just don't want to see endless Mondrian games.

I was zooming along all morning, until I ran into performance issues.... that I have no idea where they come from.

But, if you aren't trying to play the game, it makes pretty screenshots!

I wanted to make a game spoofing the games where you can carry everything in your nifty backpack. So here is my character looking at another bag of gold wondering how to pick it up.

He's a treasure hunter and he's come to this island to plunder all the loot he can! By the way, the island floats! I haven't put a lava lamp in the game yet, but I am stealing ideas from the other themes. As you might be able to tell, this is not an in-game screenshot.

I also have to include at least one scene from Indiana Jones.

If you haven't noticed, so far I'm using all default and creative commons assets, and at the rate I'm going, I'm not sure I'll have time to replace them. I'm taking a break for dinner and then I'll see if my computer will stop complaining about how much I'm making it do.

Ludum Dare 40 was going to be awesome. I was far away from everything that would bother me, my (not quite yet) wife was in another country, I had no obligations, albeit I had no real world meetup to go to but that would be okay.

On Saturday morning, I woke up and saw the theme. All I could think about were the games where you pick up everything. Found a snotty tissue paper on the road? Pick it up, it might be needed for the puzzle where you cover the drain when you insert a coin in to the machine and the fish flies out of the machine and without something covering the drain it uselessly goes down the drain. You have 100 coins of gold, 5 days of food, plate mail armor, a sword, three staves of monster scaring, a wand of fireballs, and a ten foot staff in your small backpack? Sure why not toss a human sized jade statue in there as well. I'm sure it will become useful someday and only takes up one inventory slot. So I made a game where the more you picked up, the slower you moved.

If you are interested, you can see the progress report here.

But, Sunday, something happened. I have no idea what. I'd like to blame my friend who told me about a new version of Angband, which I haven't played in years and really should never play again, but I would also have to blame Factorio. In any case, I absolutely did not add anything to the game. I fixed no bugs, changed no assets, wrote no new code... killed a bunch of monsters in Angband and a bunch of trees in Factorio. (And both of these games are ridiculous examples of the trope. In Factorio you can hold a train, a tank, and a small car in your inventory, no problem, along with enough walls to surround your base and keep out the biters, and all the laser turrets you'll need to defend your base.) I did nothing but play video games on Sunday. :(

Sunday night, I picked up my (not yet) wife at the airport, told her I didn't finish Ludum Dare, showed her what I had done, and she was lauded me on how much I accomplished. She told me I should finish the game on Monday.

Except, on Monday, we had to drive to her parents house, as we were getting married on Tuesday. So we woke up, got organized, and drove to her parents house. And of course, there, I wasn't getting much done. Monday in the middle of the night, the night before our wedding, some time around 2.00am, my (will be in about ten hours now) wife wakes me up, and asks: "Did you submit your game?"

I woke up, looked at ldjam.com, realized I had about three hours to go before the Jam was finished, wrote up some nice text for it, uploaded it to itch.io, found a button that said "Unfinished", and submitted it like that. I got back in to bed and promised her to remind her that on the night before our wedding, she woke me up and asked me if I submitted my game to Ludum Dare.

You can check out the work in progress if you like.

I would have included a cute animation from the game but I can not seem to edit video (using OBS to capture the display and every video editor I try seems to crash on me when I try to make an animated gif). So instead, a recycled screenshot!

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.polypogon.wisdomcollector

In a moment of being between jobs, I redid my Ludum Dare 28 game! It's now on the Google Play store (but not quite yet iOS app store, but it's getting there)! I think I like the gameplay of the Ludum Dare version better, but the new version is so so so much more beautiful, and has less violence, and has nicer messages.

The game is called Wisdom Collector and even is already translated to Turkish!

I would love for people to try the game out, and let me know what you think! Tell me of all the bugs, tell me what is fun, tell me what is boring.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.polypogon.wisdomcollector

I wrote up a postmortem for my LD46 game, and it is very long! Don't worry, it's broken up by lots of pictures, and even some animated gifs! I talk about how I made the game, what went right and what went wrong, feedback I had received, and what might I do in the future to build upon this game! So go read it!

https://laaph.itch.io/protect-it/devlog/140246/the-making-of-protect-it

You'll see a much better version of this at https://twitter.com/Laaph023/status/1312365859210440705

Edit: I thought it would be better, but twitter has gone and blurrified it! Try here instead: http://laaph.com/tmp/mobius.mp4

Any suggestions for turning this in to a game are welcome.