Finally took part in my first Ludum Dare!

This was a lot of fun and I learned a lot going through the experience!

So QuickDraw is a game where Wizards duel by drawing runes to cast spells. The closer the runes match the spell the greater the effect of the spell, fail very badly and the spell will backfire causing damage to you.

I wish I had more time, as I had to leave out so many things, but at least it is working and playable!

Edit: Found and removed a bug causing crashes in certain conditions if the AI’s mana is to low.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=25892

Tags: java, libgdx

Just completed my second LD! Decided to do the JAM this year and got my younger brother to help (his first time using Unity) and my wife to help with design and some of the art.

POST MORTEM:

Unfortunately, in between rolling blackouts for the whole weekend, intermittent internet and a 6 month old son demanding a lot of attention, several features had to be cut, the lovely sketches my wife made for the characters could not be processed in time and almost no balancing was done.

We started doing the design on paper, while the power was out, and came up with a concept for a digital board game where you play as Silk Road type tycoon. This tycoon would log in to his/her computer and use it to manage their world wide network of contacts to supply resources (Drugs, Organs and Weapons) where it is needed.

What I think went well:

LOVED working with the new Unity 4.6 GUI stuff. It was quick and easy to setup controls. I really enjoyed the experience!

Was fun working in a small team, instead of doing it myself.

Almost gave up on Sunday night, but came back determined after work on Monday to finish what we started!

A good introduction to working in a team on a collaborative project, subversion and Unity for my brother (who is still a student).

What we could have done better:

More practice before hand using the tools.

Smaller scope.

Getting a playable version out a LOT quicker, and then iterating from there (no fiddling with the GUI to make it look cool until later!)

Dedicated baby sitter 😉

Extra:

Some of the characters that did not make it into the game. I’m the one with the beard and the pony tail.

Please PLAY and leave us some feedback or suggestions!

We finished just in time to get something up to play!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/45/in-the-beginning-4

My brother and I have not have a chance to participate since LD34, so we were very excited to get the opportunity with the new October timeslot to take part.

We had 4 solid ideas, but of course we decided to skip the realistically achievable ones and go all in!

We wanted to create a simple puzzle game and wanted to focus on getting something aesthetically pleasing, telling the story of a caveman receiving the gift of fire and thereby sparking the rise of man.

For our tools we chose Unity and Blender.

What went well: - Looks pretty good! - First 3D game - Cool node system that generates the nodes with their connections - Had lots of fun - Had some rest in between

Struggles: - Most of the puzzle mechanics we worked on was left out at the end as we ran out of time - Unity's animation was a pain - really struggled to get movement correct and in sync with the tiles (burned many hours on this) - Could not create a final build with baked lightmaps as it was producing artifacts, finally deleted the lightmaps and voila! - No time to add sound and ambient music

The results are out and we are super happy with the results!

We received a lot of positive and constructive feedback during the jam, especially watching people streaming our game. Thank you everyone, it was a great experience!

Special thanks to @coleslaughter, @caudatecoder, @Erkberg, @Nerzal and @honest-dan for all the advice!

Over the last couple of weeks we have polished up our game with some fancier art, bug fixes and tweaked the level design. We also added some additional levels to complete after the main game has been completed (and we are designing more)!

Try it at: https://neil-sadie.itch.io/board-to-death

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