My second ludum dare. EXCITING! LD24 was really fun

I’ll be using OpenGL and C++ with GLFW and my personal base code from LD24.

Good luck all!

Count me in, people. Third time now, excited as always!

I’ll be using my minimal C++ engine from LD24/25. It’s mostly a wrapper for GLFW, OpenAL and FreeType.

LET’S DO IT.

Conception

It was my first time using Unity in a LD, so I thought I might as well try something bigger than I normally do. So I chose a FPS since I had never made one before. First (obvious) idea that came to mind was limiting the ammo to a single bullet, but the thought of getting back that bullet is weird. Then I thought of using a bow as a weapon, so that getting the single arrow back would be understandable. I kept that idea until the end of the first day, when I decided to make the game funnier: the gun was back and its single bullet too. What happens when it’s fired? The obvious: you start throwing your gun at stuff. There were also little robots as enemies before, scrapped that in favor of devilishly cute floating targets. I find quotes that appear when you die very annoying, so I had to put them in my first FPS of course.

Difficulties

The outlined walls were a pain. The default Unity Toon shaders did not work properly and every single outline shader I found had annoying problems. In the end I managed to adjust one to my needs and, thankfully, it fit nicely. Unity collision system was also a pain. The gun kept going through walls even with continous collision enabled (???). Fixed that by making the static colliders really really thick, horribly hacky. Fun fact: There are no floor or ceiling meshes in the game, it’s just the viewport clear color. Music had its frustrations as well. I tried Terry’s Bosca Ceoil first but couldn’t compose anything good. The final, almost silent, bgm is from Autotracker.

Conclusion

Unity is great for making games quickly as long as they’re simple and, most importantly, as long as you know its flaws (and they’re many). I’m proud of the result, my most fun LD game so far. Still lots of polishing to do though. You can play my game, Lovely Bullets, here.

Tags: animated gif, post-mortem, Unity 3D

not this time, thiefs!

Hello! The last time I was in a Ludum Dare my game was a little bit stolen by one of those browser games websites and to this day it’s still there, without my permission. This time I took some precautions! I want to share a very simple way to do it, in case it’s of interest to anyone.

The idea is to check the URL of the page the game is running on and then, if it’s not something you know and approve of, disable the game in some way. Here’s a bit of C# code that does exactly that. Don’t forget to check for ludumdare.com if you embed your game here. If you need me to explain the code with more details or have suggestions on how to improve it, let me know!

Oh, by the way, if the host turns out to be unknown, I wouldn’t just disable the game right away, but instead put a message after the title screen or the first level directing the user to your website or something like that. This way if the pesky thief doesn’t go far enough to see it, they will just generate free traffic for you! The tables have turned ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

Tags: unity, web