Hey everyone,

This will be my first Ludum Dare and I’m super excited! I’ve got a few experiences doing rapid prototyping. Heck almost all my games could be considered prototypes! If you’re interested what other games I’ve made then check out my portfolio at: www.tobiasbaumann.net

Since most of the time I’ve no idea what I’m doing programming wise I’ll focus on producing a playable prototype asap. I’ll then iterate trough the core gameplay until it feels right and fun. If I got any time left I’ll polish. Since this is my first time I’m really curious as to how it’ll turn out.

I’ll also live stream the whole thing at: http://www.twitch.tv/naughtyloose

Dev environment: Unity 3D
Graphics: Photoshop
3D: 3D Studio Max
Audio: Audacity / Goldwave
Dev OS: Win7 64bit

Oh and here’s my desktop photo:

naughtyloose’s workplace

Aight, I hope I did everything right with this “I’m in” post. Good luck to everyone and I’m looking forward to playing all the prototypes

Tags: deskphoto

After spending the whole morning brainstorming and writing game ideas I’ve decided to go with the following idea:

A strategy/simulation game with very limited interactions. You have been elected as the new king of a small kingdom and must bring prosperity by making the right decisions. The goal of the game is very simple, reach a population of X (to be announced). The grand issue tough is that no matter what you chose someone in your kingdom will always be unhappy and the bigger your population gets the more difficult it’ll be to keep your citizens happy. Eventually you’ll have to sacrifice your good will in order to reach your goal and win the game. But at what cost? because in the end you’ll have turned into the villain in the eyes of your citizens.

This idea is largely inspired by William Shakespear’s Macbeth.

Here’s the mind map I did while brainstorming:

And here are my other ideas I didn’t choose:

————————————————————
You’re the evil cube wishing to do XXX upon YYY in order to reach ZZZ.
————————————————————
Hero has to reach X, you have to prevent him from doing so by using all kinds of obstacles.
————————————————————
You have to fight the hero who is an increadibely bad and incompetente fighter but you have to let him win in order to receive the applaus from the audience.
————————————————————
You are a mountain the hero tries to conquer. Prevent him from reaching the top and getting salvation.
—————————————————————
You are the evil temptation in the form of sweets and must jump into the mouth of people who are on a diet.
—————————————————————
You are the god of sins. You get points by leading people to commit sins. The bigger the sin the more points.
————————————————————–

Now time to start coding. Watch it all go down live right here: http://www.twitch.tv/naughtyloose 😀

Tags: journal, you_are_the_king

1:30 AM now and I got some basic npc functionality in place. You can build houses that spawn citizens which walk around randomly until a certain population cap. Here’s a screenshot:

Next up is coding of worker behavior. As always watch it all go down live on my stream at: http://www.twitch.tv/naughtyloose

Tags: journal, you_are_the_king

Ok so I’ve got basic worker AI in place and I’m trying to calculate/balance the happiness factor next. I also realized that I may have to scratch my one-choice-at-a-time idea of forcing the player to choose what his citizens should do each day. I realized that this is annoying as I’ve to decide/click in a regular interval. I think a continues simulation will be more fun and probably easier to balance. I’ll sleep about this and decide tomorrow morning.

Here’s another good night screenshot

As always I’ll continue live streaming (http://www.twitch.tv/naughtyloose) tomorrow.

Tags: journal, screenshot, you_are_the_king

Here I’m with another update. So far the essential stuff works. Essential that is all resource gathering and the death of the whole population if there is no food. However this brings me to a more fundamental issue regarding the core concept of the game, or what is the motivation for the player.

The initial design was that the player becomes the villain by his own actions in order to win the game. Now I’m having a hard time integrating this concept into the game in a meaningful way. The original win condition was to reach a certain population amount. But how do we turn the player into a villain by doing so? Simply forcing the workers to work all the time in order to provide enough food for the whole population seems too simply and boring. Hopefully I can come up with a good idea in the remaining hours.

Here are some new screenshots to keep you entertained

As always, watch me solve this game design mystery live on my stream: http://www.twitch.tv/naughtyloose

Tags: journal, ld25, livestream, screenshot, you_are_the_king

So this will be my second LD and I’m totally stocked but also tired as its 1 am here in Switzerland. I’ll try to get a good nights sleep so my mind will be ready for the task ahead. As usually my weapons, erhm, tools of choice:

Engine: Unity
Coding: JavaScript (Mono)
Art: 3DS Max and Photoshop
Sound: jesus lord, lets see I have time for that 😀 But if I do it’ll be SFXR and Goldwave

Obligatory workspace picture:

I’ll also livestream the entire jam and to a timelapse afterwards. If you feel like watching my confused face as I’m trying to understand my own code then bookmark my Twitch page at: http://www.twitch.tv/naughtyloose/new

Timelapse of my last jam:

Good luck everybody!

Ok time for a first progress report. The game I’ve decided to make is a one-button-sidescroller with automatic shooting. Sort of. You play as an probe with automatic defense mechanisms. All you can do is increase your vertical thrusters to prevent from falling into the ground. Picking up powerups adds to your armor or increases your turret power. The goal in each level is to make it to end without being shot down by enemys or flying into the wall.

I’ve got most of the core stuff done. Win/lose state and screens. Collisions, upgrade pickup and loss (if you fly into an enemy). Next up is adding some more upgrades and another enemy type as well as some fine tuning. After that its off to creating a few levels and after that I’ll add sound. So far I’m pretty happy with what I got done in 12 hours.

If you feel like watching here’s my twitch: http://www.twitch.tv/naughtyloose/new

Hey, this doesn’t look too bad and also plays nice. Now if I only would be done with the levels and modelling some proper game models.

http://www.twitch.tv/naughtyloose/new

Finally got this done. 34 hours, and 10 minutes down to 16 minutes. If you want to play it yourself: <click me>

Tags: timelapse

I’ll be playing some Ludum Dare games and do live commentary to the best of my english capabilities:)

If you want to join the fun: http://www.twitch.tv/naughtyloose/new

If you want to add your game to the playlist: https://docs.google.com/document/d/16yk2ZSE0m5HQkmCCcxGaAFe7XHYOViKRazKXvxQj0mY/edit

Cheers!

So after spending an extensive amount of time in the shower and crying like a little boy over the theme “you only get one” I’ve finally come up with the following idea:

Grid runner is an isometric strategic puzzle game.
The goal is to get a runner into the target zone in one run by adjusting his path through various grid plates that can be placed in his way.
The player has a limited amount of grid plates available to solve each level.

So in a way its like a problem solving game where the player defines a set of actions that get executed in an order with the hope of a profitable result. In this case: of the runner getting into the target zone. What do you guys think?

I’ve yet to find a proper setting for this type of game so I’ll work on the functionality for now. I’ll mostly be using Unity3D pro, 3Ds Max and Photoshop. If you’re curious like George then you can also watch it all go down in flames (or not) on my stream that I intend to keep open for the whole LD: http://www.twitch.tv/polyganz

Tags: journal, polyganz, puzzle, strategy, twitch

Fixed some small bugs with the numbers going negative when reaching a certain value. I changed the number type to double so a 16 digit amount of cubes is possible now.

Happy clicking

Tags: cube clicker, polyganz

Thanks to Reddit player super_aardvark for this awesome screenshot of my entry:

Play CUBE Clicker

I’m super excited for this Ludum Dare jam as it’ll be the first time we’ll make the Perception Neuron motion-capture system available to all developers visiting the local Beijing jam hub. It’ll allow developers to record motions for their actors very easy and on the fly. I’ll also use it and see what kind of game I can get done in 48 hours using recorded motion capture data. Should be very interesting.

If you want to know more about Perception Neuron here are two links: Kickstarter / Website

So for this jam I wanted to use the motion capture system Perception Neuron. Because I work at the company who developed the system it was my goal to see how well it worked for recording animations and what I could get done in 48 hours. The rules I set upon myself turned about to make the jam a lot more difficult once the theme was announced. I spent a good amount of time trying to pair game ideas with motion-capture, the time and resources I had available.

The idea of having a recorded motion and then disabling the animation to turn the character into a ragdoll turned out to be really easy. Unity’s animation controller is pretty straight forward with this as you can use one invisible character with the recorded motion and then use another rigged model as the visual component driven by the animation controller. When you turn off the animator component the ragdoll becomes active. I was surprised how well this worked. This allowed me to use the recorded motion without any data cleanup or anything else in Unity. Simply exported as an FBX file from the tracking software and imported into Unity.

The resulting game concept from that was pretty straight forward. Prevent dude A from reaching point B by dropping stuff on his head.

Give it a try and let me know what you think.

It's been a while since I did a LD compo so I'm excited to be able to join this time. I'll try to develop a sandbox style world simulation game. The task is simple: create a sustainable world with the tools available. The trick is that you only have limited influence on how things evolve and behave.

I'll live stream the whole development from my home in Beijing. Feel free to drop by and say hi: https://www.twitch.tv/polyganz

For this LDJam I'll be making a word-arrange puzzle game. The goal is simple: arrange words into a catchy advertisement slogan in order to attract so many people the trip/holiday/destination gets overbooked.

I'll try to make it in similar fashion to how 'Papers Please' is played and setup. Lets see if I can make this fun.

Twitch stream live from Beijing, China: https://www.twitch.tv/polyganz