We are a small egyptian team called “Null DIES” that started way back in 2010 we’ve been making incomplete games since then, and thanks to Ludum Dare this is technically our first “complete” game. We still can’t believe that this game didn’t exist 3 days ago (feels like a month’s work!).Our name actually originated from the fact that we spent years just talking and thinking but doing almost nothing, our output was “null” 😀

I don’t know how the demographics of this LD event, but we feel that we are one of the few Egyptian teams here, and we really hope that we did a great job a representing our country

The game we made called “Drop It” originated from the though “what if the unconventional weapon is sound waves? what if it’s … a DUBSTEP GUN?!!”, soon after than various videos and music started inspiring us (specifically Corridor Digital’s “Dubstep Guns” video), we also had other good ideas like using Farts as a weapon but I’m glad we didn’t do that 😀

One of the biggest issues we faced during the competition was the fact that in Egypt the weekend is Friday and Saturday, add to that the fact that we are UTC+2, this meant that for us the competition happened during two work days, I was lucky to be able to take these days off but the other members of the team took one or no days off from work.
Another problem we faced was the fact that our awesome 2D Artist is currently doing an internship/training abroad and he was busy with too many things so effective communication was very hard.
But apart from team management, one of the big problems we had was that we decided to make the game very music driven, we wanted the player to feel like a DJ jamming some crazy beats and drops, so we basically had to learn how dubstep is made and we had to find a good free pack of samples that can be used to make dubstep music which proved to be very hard. On the upside though, one of our team members was part of a band so he had experience with audio editing which helped a bit even though he wasn’t a dubstep kind of person.

But in the end I’m actually very happy with the result, it captures most of the ideas I had in mind when we were coming up with is, we wanted a colorful insane beat-driven experience and I think we delivered well on that (even though the sound mixing need more work), I sadly didn’t have time to make a highscores screen (with possibly online leaderboards) but in a last minute change I was able to incorporate presistent “best score so far” functionality.

We’re planning to publish the game to both the Google Play Store and the Windows Phone Store very soon so watch out for that

And finally, I’d like the thank the whole Ludum Dare community for encouraging us to go through this and surpass our limits!

(three members out of six, exhausted after all the work :D)

The end (of Ludum Dare 32) is neigh 😀

We would greatly appreciate if one of your last few ratings went to our game: DROP IT!

Here is a teaser gif

And here is one of the most positive review videos we got for the game 😀

Oh and BTW we will keep improving this game and we plan to eventually publish it to Android and Windows Phone
One of the changes we made so far was to make the main menu less … um … lame, so here is what it looks like right now:

And here is our team’s website in case you want to follow up with our stuff: http://nulldies.com/

Day 2 of Ludum Dare 33, things are moving smoothly so far. Since the game has no level design the second day was exclusive for modeling and programming only. If you want to read more about Day 1 check it out here.

Color Related Items.

Starting the day with a nice coffee and a little bit of research for flowers. We thought that if we took the meanings behind certain flower species we could make a connection between their meaning and their functionality in the game. However, we decided to change this approach. Adding fantasy to the flowers would make them look more “magical” so to speak.

Take a look at this rose for instance. It is made out of Ice. The Crystal petals add a very nice effect too making it look as something more than just a normal rose. If you look closely too, you will realize how nonuniform its petals are. This design approach was taken to better visualize the chaos of nature. Unlike the Order’s Items which you will see later on this blog post.

The same thing was done for this flower (The Glass Flower). You could see that each petal reflects the other petals giving the flower a very glossy/glassy feel.

The Order Related Items

When it comes to creating something for a group like The Order one must think of how “ordered” they are. When creating their items we took a very symmetric approach with modeling them. The items we created include landmines and shock-poles.

3D Render of the Mine

3D Render of the Shock-Pole

Although these two items are low-poly. They are very organized, symmetrical, and smooth with barely any rough edges unlike the items related to Color.

Also modeling of the Order Soldiers and Color started today. Since Color has more randomness she is taking more time to model as we are literally modeling her one polygon at a time. However the Order Soldiers are very symmetrical as seen in this picture.

The inspiration for their design came from Storm Troopers, who where inspired from uniforms of older Nazi Germany and right now are inspiring films like The Hunger Games and more. The bright white attire with black touches and accessories.

Programming

The game mechanics were finished today, everything works fine. However, it needs more beautifying, and that’s for the Third Day.

We managed to test the items and mines and also managed to rig and animate the character in a such a short time thanks to Mixamo for their unbelievable service.

Here is a nice screenie showing what we reached in the game.

I know our beautiful monster is not yet to be seen. But we are leaving best for last.

You can also read this post and more on our website.

The last day of the competition is over. This is it, the day everything is put together and the game finally complete, or at least the first playable version of the game.

We started the day by setting off the tasks remaining, one of which was continuing an on-going task from the day before. Color, our beautiful monster, is not yet complete. We were very picky when it came to modeling Color. In fact we modeled this character one polygon at a time… LITERALLY. Amr Kandil, one of our artists, modeled 1241 polygon individually. After 2 Days of modeling… We are proud to present, Color in 3D.

During the time Color was being modeled we finished modeling other items, including the Wind Shell and the Ice Shell.

After all the 3D assets were created, we started adjusting the game’s difficulty, creating game Main Menu, adding particle effects, and creating 2D icons for powers and items.

After all that was mixed well we can finally and proudly present our first playable of Natural Distortion.

Don’t forget to rate our game here.

Read Day 1
Read Day 2