Hey All, first time doing the Ludum dare, and I’m joined by the lovely http://www.pixelbutterfly.com/
We haven’t fully decided yet between Unity or Game Maker but we’ll let you know when we have 
Plus photoshop and audacity and ACID for the sounds and music…If we do Unity we’ll use blender for the 3d stuff ^^
Here’s the good old base camp for me:
(That bulging bag of brightly colored delicious on the desktop is in fact Gummy Dinos :D)
In other news, we’ll be doing the jam in 3D with Unity3d, Blender, and Photoshop. Audio will be done in ACID Express and Audacity. We’re really hoping that after the jam, @pixelbutterfly will be able to continue building this into her thesis project as she pursues a master’s degree at SCAD.
Even though we were in the jam, we decided the game was in a good enough place to submit it :).
Go play Reveal http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-21/?action=preview&uid=4961
Hey All! I wanted to do a quick postmortem on the game we submitted to the Jam, Reveal.
What went right
A solid artistic vision. Most of the artistic vision for this game came from @pixelbutterfly, who also did the art. At the core of the game, it’s about uncertainty in a world where the media tells you who to be and how to look. But as you scratch deeper below that, and peel away the superficial layers, the world only gets uglier. Finally, as my own little nihilistic touch, you realize that the escape you sought from your uncertainty wasn’t exactly as you had planned it.
A simple mechanic. We wanted a game about systematic destruction. What could be funner than that? Unity3d has a great support for physics at its core, so it lent itself quite naturally to such a game. Almost everything in the game (except the wallpaper) is powered by pretty standard rigidbody physics, so it was very easy to implement and get running quickly.
What Went Wrong
Startup time issues. We had some initial creative differences and as a result, ended up not getting started until Saturday night. As a result, we ended up cutting out several of the more meaningful layers for some of the less intensive ones. Oddly enough, this didn’t really get in the way of development too much…after cutting the more time-consuming room layers, we finished the game way ahead of time (even submitting before the contest deadline). That gave us more time for audio and testing. Sure, it’s not perfect, but for 24 hours of dev it’s pretty good
Learning. I’ve done a lot of game jams in the past, and every time I go into them with the mentality that I want to learn something new and significant. This is either something specific like, “I want to learn how to write 2D physics and do pixel-perfect collision from scratch,” or something more general like, “I want to think about Level Design in a new way.” Unfortunately, I can’t say that I learned that much from this game development, and the same goes for @pixelbutterfly. Because of the vision and scope for the project, she didn’t have any game assets to create from scratch, and her dev computer was out of commission for the weekend.
Summary
Ludum Dare is great! I’ve followed the Ludum Dare scene for the past year or so, but this is my first time participating, and I’m astounded by the level of creativity and enthusiasm that has come to the table from all over the world. At Uni, our game development club would host game jams a few times a semester, but they were generally ill-attended affairs with 2 or 3 teams coming out with something to show, and solo development being a rare bird. As I look through the 500+ game catalog of LD #21 and wonder how I’m going to be able to rate them all in the next 21 days, I know that this is something I want to be a part of for years to come
Some of you may remember me from last Ludum Dare jam, where I did Reveal with my friend. This time, I’m going it alone in the competish. Unity3d and Blender are tools of choice, and I’ll be streaming development w/chat a la http://www.justin.tv/offwhitefox.
P.S. no overtly nihilistic themes in my game this time. Though on second thought…
Hey All! I got kind of a late start (didn’t start any development until Saturday morning at 7am) but I’m making good progress so far. Basic premise is a physics-based escape the room game — keys are hidden in certain (breakable) objects and you need to find a way to break them and get that sweet, sweet escape. Levels flow through a typical house.
Oh yeah, you’re a tiny pink kitten too ^^
So far I’m on track to finish, though my art might be a little behind due to some challenges with blender+livestreaming causing my computer to overheat. Plan is to finish mocking up the levels and crank out the art today and then integrate everything and work on sound/music tomorrow. I’ll keep streaming at http://www.twitch.tv/offwhitefox until I finish mocking up the levels tonight, but then I might need to switch it off and finish the art.
After a 17 hour burn yesterday I’ve made some excellent progress. First, all the art is in and it’s got it going on 😉 I just wrapped up a music track, which leaves me with the following:
And…if I was really feeling crazy I’d go through and redo the player animations, because they’re a little shady right now. But we’ll see how much time I have left after all the above is said and done. And here’s a screenshot for you fellow greedy gamedevs:
And now, the moment at least 4 of you have been waiting for…Kitty Alone! Enjoy! (And vote :D)
It’s been a while since I’ve done a LD48 but I’m psyched to be back in the scene! I’ve been putting it off for too long, so I decided this is the ideal time to explore the constraints of Unity’s Flash platform target. Unfortunately, I won’t be live streaming this time because I’ll be working across a few locations. Here is my game plan:
Genre: Roguelike, Adventure
Engine: Unity3d (C#)
Platform: Flash
Art: Blender, Photoshop, Seashore
Audio: Psycle, Sfxr
Kongregate Contest: Maybe!
Influences: I’ve been playing a lot of Spelunky lately so this is inevitably going to be a love letter to Derek Yu <3
Haven’t done one in a while, but I’m down for this one – and with no ratings? I can finally create a text adventure without being openly shunned!
Engine: Custom
Language: Javascript, HTML
Text Editor: Visual Studio Code
Let’s do it!