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Hey All!

Noah here, and I’m a game design student from Vancouver, British Colombia, and this will be my first Ludum Dare.

I’m going on the slightly lighter side of things and taking part in the Jam part, rather than the compo. Tagging along with me is my buddy and fellow student Izzy (here is his twitter too!) for the endeavor!

We participated in our first game jam last month at IamGamer, and we loved the experience, and thought, heck, why not another! I’ll be handling most of the art side of the project, while Izzy will tackle the code side of the project (although our skills are interchangeable). Super excited to get down to business tomorrow! Good luck everyone, and see you on the battlefield!

Das List

• Coding: Game Maker: Studio Masters
• Visual Tools: GraphicsGale, Photoshop
• Musical Junk: SFXR for sound effects, and cgMusic for music. Hopefully we’ll luck out and get some good tunes
• Note Taking and planning: Google Docs and good ol’ white board and markers!

Since we’ll be working out of my apartment, we’ll be able to have quick meetings and hand off different files to one another during the event.

Other things we’ll be using:

• Domino’s Pizza
• Energy Drinks
• Coffee
• Restraining Orders
• Foul Language

One thing we need to really focus on is getting our core concept nailed down and getting a cohesive theme set so that we can both begin coding and generating art. The faster we can build our base systems and quirks, we can begin bug testing and getting all the nasty bits out of the way so we can focus on polish later on. We also really need to have a strict time delegation for one another, as we tend to goof off and joke around when we’re left to our own devices. It will also be a bit more of a struggle for me, seeing as how I’m already swimming in projects for school, but we’ll see how that goes!

Noah here!

Well, we got all of our features in! Yay! I’d consider that a success!

Now its just a matter of expanding upon what we’ve already got done. Things on the table for us to accomplish are front and back end hook ups, a short tutorial screen, and more polish. Polish includes bonus content for the game like additional “days” where new conditions to your work flow are added, more dialog writing, and so forth. As well as squashing a few pesky bugs Izzy is hunting down.

Hopefully we’ll have a few screenshots for our next update, but until then, Thanks for reading! And good luck on your games!

Ps. We have little vocal warbles in our game. So when you play it, you’ll be treated to me mouthing gibberish 😀

Hey Everyone! Hope your jams are going well!

It’s Noah again with another update for our game (myself and my buddy Isaac) Please Hold!

This screen shot depicts our paper shredder in action. Basically, the player will get messages from the government, and after reading the documents, they must be shredded so that information doesn’t fall into the wrong hands.

The game, as it stands right now, is to us, completed! However, with all this extra time we’ve got on our hands, we’re going to spend it polishing up the mechanics and squashing more bugs. Right now, the grid is a simple 3×3. We’re working to expand not only the grid size, but the number of jacks the player has to work with. We’re also going to be working in a citation system if you mess up, and polish up our front and back ends for the game.

That’s it! We’re going to get back to work now.

Good luck to everyone on the rest of the jam, and I look forward to seeing all of your amazing games!

<3

Looks like I’ll be entering this years compo! It’ll be my second LD since LD27, so I’m very excited to finally get involved once again.

Like last time, I’ll be teaming up with my good friend, Isaac (@DesertPunkIzzy ) for the en devour.

We’ll be using our usual tools: Game Maker Studio, GraphicsGale. We’ll also be using random sound generation software and royalty free music, because yay for not being sued!

Good luck to everyone and see you on the battlefield!

Xoxoxo

@NoahC_

Howdy!

Well, as soon as Isaac and I found out the theme, we spent the first hour or so laying out all the ground rules. We brainstormed, adjusted scope, and got right down to it!

Since Isaac is basically a machine, he cranked out the basics of how the game should work in about 4 hours, and it works marvelously. I’m in the midst of doing some spriting for various interactables (rocks, dirt, and soon to be fossils!).

Our game, Prehistoric Kerfuffle, is about quick, fun, and easy to pick up gameplay centered around digging up fossils. You have to use tools like a brush to sweep away dirt, and a chisel to break down rocks, in order to get them sweet sweet fossils! You’ve only got a limited amount of time, so you have to be fast and precise!

Once your time has run up, you can then take 4 fossils and fixate them to your character. Each fossil provides stats, aesthetic changes, and moves. From there, its time to battle!

Battles are carried out in a pokemon-esque fashion. We hope that everything continues to go smoothly 😀 And we’ll get some screen shots as soon as we can!

Good luck to everyone else on the rest of the jam!

Lots of work got completed today! We almost have all of the fossils sprited out, and the basic digging mechanics is essentially done!

Most of the sound effects have been completed, and the work remaining is slowly becoming a shorter list than the work completed. Over all, things are going quite smoothly!

Here’s a bit of a taste of the experience so far!

And thus ends our adventure for LD 48! Being our second LD jam that we’ve worked on together, Isaac and I knew what we were getting into. The only difference this time was distance. This is the first time we’ve worked on a project that we weren’t in the same room/province, so it was a good experience in communication and and time zone management. Over all, things went incredibly smooth, all things considered, and now its time to break it all down!

What went well!:

• Ground planning: Right out of the gates, we had a pretty solid idea of what exactly our game was going to be, and most importantly, what it WASN’T going to be. It gave us a great platform to dive head first off of. Although it seemed like taking the hour and a half to purely just talk the idea out and write down everything was too long (when we could have gotten right down to working), it benefited us in the long run. Initially, we only wanted to spend about 45 minutes to brainstorm and get the idea in place, but the extra half hour let us really solidify the idea.
• Constant communication: As previously mentioned, this is the first project we’ve undergone being in completely different time zones, so right off the bat, the most important thing was staying in contact. We did this by always being on skype, and calling each other when we were unsure of something, or needed clarification, or what ever. The wonders of the modern age!
• Complimentary styles: This one isn’t something everyone will get 100% of the time, but Isaac and I think basically the same when it comes to game development. It made the process much easier, since whatever I was thinking/planning, chances are he was thinking the same thing, and in most cases, as already doing it anyway. Picking to do a jam or any collaborative effort really goes much easier when you’re paired with like minded people.
• Scope: I went into the project with the sole goal of making something that had an absolutely realistic and attainable scope. Even initial planning phases for us went to the chopping block, and as a result, we had a much more streamlined and stress free jam. This came down to condensing things like gameplay features, art assets, and so forth.

When went horribly, disaster-ably wrong!:

You know….nothing really ACTUALLY went that wrong, if I’m going to be completely honest. I can’t think of one major “OH GOD OH NO ITS ON FIRE WHAT DO WE DO?!” moment. We had a few minor hiccups, such as:

• Oversleeping: This was mostly on me. Too many late nights in a row resulted in a few over slept alarms, and in one case, I wasn’t feeling all that well. Something rather minor, but a problem none the less.
• Distance: For the most part, this wasn’t a huge issue for us, but it did slow things down for us in comparison to our last LD where we were one room apart. Not being able to walk over and check on how things are going on the other end kinda suck, but thats why Skype has screen share!

In the end….
It all went pretty well! I have no complaints about this jam, and we both produced a game that we’re both very excited, happy, and proud to have made! I don’t think this is the end of this project either, as we’re currently making plans to expand the idea a bit more and continue to work on. Thanks all for reading, and have an awesome day! 😀

♥ Noah

PS: Check out the game here!