• Engine: Unity,
• Language: C#
• Tools: Magica Voxel, Gimp.

MONSTER! RUN!

Can I use image effects and cartoon shaders from unity package in my game on compo?

Something very bad happens with video, but you can enjoy my little brother’s screams (and my horrible music).

Finally i recorded my game in “good” quality, i have 1440×900 monitor, so i must record it in 1366×768 resolution in window.

I fixed scrolling down game’s page on google chrome, thanks to this tread.

Game

Game’s page

Engine: Unity

Music: Bosca Ceoil

Graphics: I will try to do vector graphics in Inkscape or simple flat colored graphics in Krita.

If I fail I will just draw extremely low resolution pixel art.

Good luck to everyone!

gif  (I don’t know why it isn’t animated on page)

Struggled a lot with theme.

Few things to draw left and I will start making maps.

Alien’s Curse

I started by writing and doodling ideas in my notebook.

After getting general idea of gameplay I began constructing muenu panels, characters and items using my already existing scripts.
Few adjustments and fixes and my gameplay prototype was ready. It didn’t differ much from the final game:
Platformer with mouse aiming focused on fighting with AI.

Day Two:

First I needed to choose game’s style. Quickly I realized that I can’t make decent looking hand drawn sprites in that short time.
I couldn’t make vector graphics matching ancient theme, so I decided to use pixel art.
My first idea was to draw ancient Greek architecture and sculptures as enemies.
It looked pretty nice but I couldn’t find natural sky color contrasting with it
(I must start making colored doodles, my color picking skills still aren’t dependable enough.)

I decided to switch to drawing characters, drawing and animating player sprite was much easier than doing tileset.
I looked through my notes and found good fable idea for pyramid expedition game.
After searching for reference images I started doing tiles again, this time it turned out good enough.
I drew few details and tile varitaions and went to sleep.

Day Three:

Drawing the mummy wasn’t very difficult, although I spent some time on research of slow walking animation.
I spent next few hours on polishing sprites and modifying scripts.
Then I started recording sounds (I put a thick coverlet on a small table and recorded under it).
I practiced making music the day before jam, so I didn’t struggle with it as much as in previous jams.
After having all assets done (about 9pm) I started making maps using my unity custom editor.
And then I realized I didn’t test game on target (WebGL) platform.
You know, what’s coming: bugs. Two hours left and two game breaking bugs to fix, it gave me a lot of stress.
Fortunally one of them happened in my previous game, so I only needed to check few files.
Second was my syntax error: I wrote (value<-0) in my health script.
It worked in the editor, but as you probably know some crazy stuff happens when you build Unity3D projects, so it didn’t pass.
I published my game half hour before jam deadline with feeling of relief.
The game turned out better than I excepted and I got a lot of ideas for tools, games and things to practice.

Tools I used:
-Unity3D
-Gimp
-Piskel
-Audacity
-Bosca Ceoil
-GifCam

What went wrong:

-I wasted too much time on graphics
-I started doing levels too late

What went well:

-Adding tutorial makes big difference, I didn’t get any comments like: “X didn’t work”, “I didn’t know what to do”
-Fable wasn’t as bad as I expected

Key Takeaways

-Instead of chaotic testing of different kinds of graphics I should put all possibilities as soon as possible and choose the best one in first two hours
-I should work on levels from the beggining and make them easy to update after adding new content and changing scripts
-The game has only three levels and tutorial and still nobody is complaining about it’s length;
I think that one of the challenges of making game for LD is showing as many game features as possible in shortest gameplay time, since most of people spend only few minutes on playing each game.

It is probably the longest text I’ve ever written in English.
Sorry for my bad writing skills and thanks for reading.

Game Page

First I started by making quick prototype using scripts I already had from my previous games.
After getting basic zombie AI and player script working I moved to drawing sprites.
Player needed to rotate around, so I had to use 12×26 sprites size insted of my usual 8×8.
I tried to use color combinations I learned from drawing manga.

I didn’t have any idea how to draw walk cycle from isometric perspective, so I sticked to simple animation.
For some reason I decided to use unity animation system.
Considering how much time I spend on turning off settings that break pixel art animations and setting up animator tree it wasn’t a good decision.

Then I added two additional enemy types: one that follow player and shoot him when he’s close enough and turret.
Score system was very easy to impement, I wish I spent a little more time on it and add some animations or effects.

After that I drew a simple enemy sprite.
I though that I will differentiate enemies by adding color variations, but it didn’t looked right so every one of them looks the same.
(Another thing I didn’t do for no reason and now I regret it.)
Remembering how sterile my previous games looked I added few things lying on the floor.
If I had some more time I would add script placing them randomly but the deadline was looming and the game still wasn’t fully functional

.
Next few hours I spent on setting up UI panels.
Thanks to TheNumberGuy I didn’t have to struggle with music, so I just generated a few sounds using bfxr.
I playtested game, tweaked few values quickly and uploaded it on itch.io and ludum dare.
I still had some time until deadline, but it was already past midnight and I was afraid I will do something stupid or just fall asleep on my keyboard.

What went well:
The game doesn’t have any horrible bugs, everything works and I really like the final look of it.

What went wrong:
Adding a few details would help the game a lot.
I wish I added some kind of shop, bonuses or weapon variation to keep players longer in game.
Also the game feels very ordinary, it is just a top down shooter.
Seeing all of the other ludum dare games I noticed that adding a little twist to game, makes it much more outstanding and interesting.

Conclusion:
I won’t probably continue developing this game but it was a nice opportunity to quickly test my skills, experiment a little and deploy game in small amount of time.

Game Link

This time I'll be making a point click game. You can follow my progress on my twitch channel: Link

I uploaded a few work in progress images on my website You can also follow development of the game on my twitch channnel: link

I finished moving sprites to unity and setting up the map. Now I need to add actual puzzles and story. Also the game still lacks animations and sounds.

Stream

I'm afraid of making full walkthrough, since the game is rather short and easy, so it would probably result in people watching video instead of playing it.

But here are some gifs showing how the game looks and how to play it.

The game is rather simple, the only thing you need to do is to search for items that you can interact with using mouse.

I'm really curious about whether this type of gameplay is both satysfying and easy or too repetitive and boring. Eaither way I'm really satisfied with how pixel art turned out.

You can play it here:

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/house-escape

I'm playing ludum dare games on twitch right now:

link

If you are interested in having your game played and rated on the stream, join me there.

[Stream Ended]

Before Jam

Before jam I had an idea of how I want my next game to be: something extremely content-based, with simple mechanics and controls. I recently noticed that generally games that have more content and actually show player their progress are better perceived than the ones with more complex mechanics, so I wanted to test it.

Theme

To be honest I didn't like the theme, I find general terms like "one room" or "simplicity" as less inspiring, I'd rather have very specific instructions and make something unexpected. "Cooking simulator" or Medieval RTS" might sound generic but they provide you something that you can easier diverge from. Right now the theme itself might sound interesting but it led to a lot of similar games. But that's just an opinion, based on my weak game designing skills, so don't worry about it too much.

First Day

I started by making really simple, low effort drawings, just to have my ideas wrote down.

My first idea was to make a game on small planet, but I don't like how low resolution pixel art looks when it is rotated. Now, when I think about it I see many ways to solve this, like square planet, platformer with normal gravity and very small planets used as platforms etc.

Second one were a world built of floating islands, this one was kinda cool. It'd probably require a lot of modular art like grass, plants and walls to quickly built an island. I don't really feel comfortable with doing big repetitive environments like these.

I choose the third one, taking place in one room (maybe basement). Also I wanted to make the environment somewhat dynamic, so things like falling ceiling, destroying furniture and some explosions or fire.

I really liked this idea, so I started programming prototype in Unity. After few hours I had walking, equipment and basic interactions.

MouseController.cs

Player.cs

Inventory.cs

As you can see, I used one script to process mouse input, and choose to which object send it. Next script defines player movement. I tried to keep it separated from others and easy to control from outside. It later proved itself useful when I needed to do the final cutscene. Inventory script is quite simple, each item has it own sprite and bool value that states whether it is unlocked or not.

Next I moved to Gimp (I made concept sketch in Krita). I started by drawing in black, white and transparent. After drawing player, sofa, placard with cat and chair I realised that I can't fit all of this on a small map (so I kind of failed the theme's challenge). I colored them, moved into Unity and went back to Krita to design the level. The placement of items stayed pretty much the same to the end.

Second Day

I started writing more specific scripts for each item and adding more graphics. I tried to keep the game palette simple with as few colors as possible. I didn't spend a lot of time on player animation since I felt like it isn't that important for this kind of game. If I had more time I'd probably draw animations for picking things up and maybe some kind of falling over, but I already felt stressed about the deadline.

It still lacked narration and the most important part - puzzle. So I started writing down my ideas for the things that player could do with items I've already drawn, of course I had to cut some of them down, since I couldn't draw a lot (it was already 6 hours before deadline). After having clear storyline for game I went back to programming. As you can guess there was a lot of bad, unclear or even unreadable code, but that's also a good thing about game jams - not everyday you can create horrible code and get away with it.

I made some sounds in bfxr in between, just to have any audio in game. The last thing I did was final cutscene, it was made using Unity IEnumerator. I'd make a simple cutscene system with waypoints, but I didn't have much time, so I just attempted to make it as clean and durable as possible (though I got one comment saying that it didn't work properly).

I'm really glad I didn't forgot to test my game in webGL, thanks to that exporting and packaging didn't cause any surprises.

Game

Side notes:

Text:

for writing down text I used the same prefab I used for my previous few entries, so it isn't ideal, making text autoscale was easier, but I dislike the way it looks.

Vanishing items:

On the last moment before building I realised that there is no feedback when you use an item, so I decided to just remove item after using. I agree that animation or pop up window would look much better.

What went well:

• the game presents challenge that is both exciting and rewarding
• controls are clear and easy
• it is readable, you can't really get lost and frustrated by it
• pixel art look nice and aesthetic
• I didn't have any problems with building and publishing game
• I finished most of the things I planned before deadline

What went badly:

• I started from programming and graphics and leaved the most important part (map and puzzles) to the end
• I didn't have time to make music
• not enough animations and only one cutscene
• I didn't experiment enough, I could do much more when it comes to graphics or gameplay

Link to the game

Plans: -update fixing text scaling and making items stay in inventory after using -post compo version with more levels more animations, items and better equipment system -new long time project: game with actual fable, big world and easy, relaxing gameplay

If you are interested in any of these follow me on gamejolt / itch.io / twitter / twitch I'll be publishing updates for post-compo version on Gamejolt, so if you're interested, click "Follow Game" here.

Thanks for reading.

I didn't want to post the same pictures again, so here is how the game looks from "my side".

I'd really like to get some more feedback, so if you feel like playing a short point-click game, click here:

Game

Hey, I'm a game developer mostly interested in programming and art.

Here is a portfolio I've quickly put together: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1asHnKiiw2UhOwD6apkiMHj3knFCj0iCmbcWi-VyTJyI/edit?usp=sharing

In LD39 I'd like to focus on art and level design, so I'm looking for someone who would take care of programming part.

If you can program a game from start to finish with all the UI, player and camera movement animation etc and you completed at least one project, then you are the right person.

You can contact me using the email at the end of the portfolio.