I’ll have to dodge spouse aggro and play with my kids, making this even more interesting. But what’s life without a little challenge, eh?

Escape is an interesting one.  I’m still trying to figure out exactly how to represent it in a game.  I’ve got several ideas:

1. Escape from a place – You are someplace you don’t want to be, but getting out is hard
2. Escape from a prison – variation on 1, but this time something is actively trying to stop you from leave
3. Escape from a situation – You are someplace you don’t want to be, but this time the place is more of a social construct.  Social status or job perhaps, self image (too fat/weak)
4. Escape from an emotion – Some emotion is holding you back, depression, pain, paranoia

These are the ones most resonating with me right now.

The starship NALS – Not A Lost Sale – is making a run at the wall of SOPAPIPA.  Firing blasts of education, it will bring down this construct of ignorance!

This will be my second attempt at doing the Ludum Dare challenge.  Hopefully this time around I’ll finish.  I’ll most likely use Unity, though if a strong 2D idea hits me I’ll switch over to GameMaker Studio.

*sigh* This just had to happen on the Neverwinter launch weekend.

Yes, I like the theme name so much I’m making it the name of the game.  I spent last night and most of this morning thinking out how to represent the theme on multiple levels and on how to integrate it into a world that I’ve been working on for a little while now.

Some minor background, there are three types of dragons: Equines, Humanoids, and Serpentine.  This story involves Snow Furry, an equine dragon and rune mage.  She’s contracted to clear out a ‘mistake’ by a sheriff at a rather extortionist price.

The game play has been bugging me quite a bit.  In the end, I’m settling for a top-down 2D view using Unity3D.  I’ll use a rather simple RPG rule-set at first, then see if I can expand it if there’s time.  Still very up in the air about how to handle the levels, thought at first it will simply be a sequence of square rooms with the primary objectives.  I’m also going to keep everything to single mouse clicks, with the intent of making this playable on a tablet.  I doubt a phone would enough screen space.

Also did a little bit of tech research for publishing the game.  Since my last LD, Koding changed their setup and can’t be used as free hosting any more 😛  So I nosed around a little and found out that Google Drive can be used as a very basic web host.  Have it all setup now – click here if you wish to test it – though at the moment there’s nothing there except a very bland title screen 😛

And with 3-ish hours left, I need to call this a failure loss.  I was originally going to call it a failure, but upon reflection I did learn things from this, so it isn’t a true failure.  I’m going to skip the What Went Right portion of a post-mortem because so very little did go right and what there was might not have been good after all.  The game didn’t even get to a point where it was interactive, so it’s hard to say.  So what did go wrong?

Time:
I had a grand total of 10 hours to dedicate to LD.  That’s just not enough time, not when you’re going up against people who are putting in 30 hours or more.  And out of those 10 hours, I’d say 5 of them were distraction filled.  Attempting to do the LD with a family doesn’t work very well.

Scope:
My initial design was far to broad.  Now I’ve done enough 48-hour jams to realize this quickly, but it still cost extremely precious time planning things out, then looking at the time and realizing that I’d never get anything done if I continued at that pace.

The Rules:
This time around the compo rules really hammered me hard.  A good portion of my design hinged on using code snippets that were already written…and then realizing after I read over the rules summary post that I couldn’t use any of it.  That really hurt, both time-wise and moral-wise.
So how to deal with these issues next time?  Well the scope issue I think will always be there.  It can be very hard to correctly guess how much can be done within a given time frame, but with continue practice I’ll get better at it.  Time is trickier item.  It’s going to be years before that eases up, at least until my sons are teens and I don’t need to be deeply involved in their learning every day.  Until then I think my best bet is to approach the LD as a micro jam, and focus on completing something within a 4-5 hour time frame.  As for the rules…bah.  Annoying, very annoying.  I suppose my best there is to collect my code fragments and publish them so they’re publicly available, and therefor eligible for use.

So here’s to having better luck on the next one.

Taking a slightly different approach this time around.  I’ve spent the last 16 hours (with some sleep in there!) designing out on paper what I want to create.  I think I have everything to the point where I mostly know everything that needs to be coded, though I’m sure I’ll find things I’m missing along the way.  The general idea here is that since I can’t do art at all, to take the time that would have been spent on art assets and spend it in design.  I guess I’ll find out how well this works over the next 10 hours of coding  Hopefully I’ll have the framework fully in by tonight so I’ll have a good solid 10 hours or so tomorrow to refine and bug fix.

In honor of my parents Maltese that suddenly passed away this morning…

You use the energy and bravery contained in the bark of a Maltese to defend against the Shadows.

Engine: Unity
Graphics: GIMP and Blender
Sound: Audacity, ChipTone, BFXR, BeepBox.co

Total dev time is approximately 12 hours.  Pretty much only had three 4 hour chunks to work on this, so given that limitation I’ve very pleased with how it turned out.  My high score so far is 414 shadows banished.  Wish I had time to try and get something besides cubes for the shadow monsters, but such is life.  I would like feedback on the bark sfx, I had a bit of a raw throat by the time I got a decent one, and I’m curious if it was worth the effort.

Guardian Against Shadows places you in the role of a Maltese that needs to bark away the fearsome shadow monsters to protect his humans.  Bark to much though, and you’ll annoying the very humans you are trying to protect! That at least is the high level concept that I ended up with.  While there were some pretty sweeping changes from the original vision, the core of the game idea remained intact; the unconventional weapon is a dog’s bark.

A little bit of history on this idea.  Originally I was going to do something with giant monsters, regardless of the theme that came up.  My students are going to be starting their presentations on their giant monster (Kaiju) prototypes, and so I figured if I was going to take the time to create a prototype I should match up with their current theme.  Then about 5 or 10 minutes before LD started I found out that my Dad’s Maltese, Andy, had unexpectedly died that morning.  Seriously it was a shock, the little fluff ball was in perfect health when I saw him last Saturday.  So this got me thinking on how I could integrate some kind of memorial to Andy in my LD game.  When I got home and saw the theme of ‘An Unconventional Weapon’ it didn’t take me long to abandon the idea of giant monsters and go with the idea of ‘dog barks’ as my ‘weapon’.

What Went Right:

Scope Control – The initial idea was you were guarding a sick kid, and the game play would switch back and forth between the dog running around barking and playing in the room and a feverish dream where you used dog barks (collected from the bedroom scene) as literal ammo to fight back shadows.  Once that idea formed in my head, I gave it some serious thought on how I would approach this.  I swiftly realized that it would be pushing things badly even if I had the full weekend available to me, which I did not.  I knew that I only had about 12-14 hours tops to work on this.  So I had to choose between the bedroom scene and the FPS scene.  The bedroom scene was chosen because I felt it would demonstrate the idea of dog barks as weapons much more clearly if you controlled the actual dog.

Dog Look and Feel – I am very pleased with how the dog turned out.  Using my barks as the SFX is a bit cheesy, but what can you do?  Constraining the dog to the primary directions was both a design choice and a programming one.  I didn’t feel that adding in diagonal movement would add that much, compared to the complexity it would add in.

Mood – I rather stumbled into this one.  Having a sparse, bare room dimly let with the dog as the glowing center point just…really helped set the mood.  You are the sole point of light in a dark, scary world, and you will not back down from the shadows.  Perhaps I’m reading to much into it, but I’m pleased with how this aspect turned out.

What Went Wrong:

To Much Time Spent on Tiles – I spent probably close to an hour playing around with Procore’s Prototype tool, and then with Blender.  Now this isn’t Procore’s fault, I’m used to using their full tool pack but since that’s a paid package and I can’t release it as part of the source I couldn’t use it.  I was doing something wrong that was causing really bad lighting artifacts, so I switched to using Blender, and still stuck stubbornly to using tiles.  I should have just modeled it as one solid piece, as I still ended up with lighting artifacts.  Thankfully you can’t see them due to the low light.  What I should have done here was just use Unity cubes.  Would have been done with the level in minutes.

Shadow Monsters – While I’m happy with the rising up out of the floor effect I got with them, I wanted to do so much more with them.  At the very least I wanted them to have some shape beyond cubes.  I also had some ideas on simple AI so they wouldn’t just go straight towards you, but just didn’t have time to get to it.

Difficulty Progression – Gah.  While I did want to have the gradual sense of being overwhelmed and frantically barking to keep back the shadows, it happens way to fast.  Some different method would have worked a lot better.

Summary:

In terms of quality and implementing the theme, this is my best LD yet.  While I’m unsure if I can carry the idea much further, I definitely plan on polishing it up.  I had a lot of fun with the project and learned a few things, which I suppose makes any project a success.

You can play and rate it here: Guardian Against Shadows

Ya, title says it all.  Been so busy with grading/pushing my students to join/doing practice runs that I didn’t post here.  Oops.  I’ll be using either Unity or GameMaker, depending on the style of game I decide to do.  I’m going to try and work 12-tone music composition in there somehow as well. One thing I’m thinking of trying this time is restricting the core game development to two hours, then spending the remainder of the time on content and polish.  I’m rather pleased with how Dragon vs Archers turned out and it could be a fun little game with a bit more content and polish.  That said I’ll be intensely annoyed if “Strength in Numbers” turns out to be the theme.  I’m far less pleased with how Expanding Planet turned out, but since it only took me two hours, it’s no big loss.

So…tools.

1. Unity 3D or GameMaker Studio
2. GIMP
3. Blender if needed
4. Audacity
5. Blue yeti mic for SFX/recording the piano.

Tags: ld34

Going for broke and trying to do both themes.  That said, I’m focusing on Two Button Controls first.  I plan on going very literal with it and have only two buttons, either the left/right mouse or left/right edge of a phone/tablet.  For my initial idea I really needed it to be in 3D for it to make sense.  So my goal for tonight was to see if I could establish a proper scene.  Creating 3D assets, especially humanoids, from scratch is a big weakness of mine.  I’m satisfied with what I have, so I’ll work on the core mechanic tomorrow.

Tags: wip

I think everything that could go wrong from a time management perspective did go wrong for me.  As such, there’s no chance of finishing anything, really.  But I don’t consider it a failure.  I did get an idea for a game mechanic that I think will work really, really well on both mobile and desktop.  I have a very rough tech demo of it (nothing worth playing) and plan on spending the next week working on it.

Bleh, such a stressful weekend.