I’ll be in for the jam, since school plans to get in the way too much to finish a game in 2 days. I’ll be using Unity3D.

I have a regatta to go to this morning (luckily it’s a short one, so I should only be gone till noon). I’ll be spending every moment when I’m not in ridiculous agony trying to come up with ideas for the game. So, since I’ll be rowing, I guess I should stall all you competition. http://rowingsoundsfun.tumblr.com/

Also: Potatoes for breakfast! So appropriate!

I’ve decided to call my game The Quest for Philip’s Glass (Free potato for whoever gets the joke). It’s going to be only the essential elements of a puzzle platformer. Crates, buttons, ladders, jumping, and whatever else I really need to make some puzzles.

After I finish the basic locomotion, I’m gonna go have some lunch.

Here’s our hero!

So far we’ve made buttons, levers, doors, and some logic bits so they can all work together. We’ve built 3 rooms using it, but I can probably whip up 2 more rooms in just a few minutes. I just need to get the character carrying cubes.

Levels!

So, since my parents are awesome, I get to stay home from school to do this.

Last night we finished building a few more of the puzzles. This game is really starting to look AWESOME.

This will be my second Ludum Dare, the first outside of the Jam. I’m planning on using C++ with SDL for OpenGL, but if the theme seems to need it I’ll use Unity3D.

No matter what, I’ll be using Photoshop for 2D graphics.

If I use C++:

– SOIL (Simple OpenGL Image Library)

If I use Unity:

– Blender for 3d graphics

Tags: C++, opengl, photoshop, unity, unity3d

We all know I have to post a picture of my desk at some point, but I’m too lazy to go get the camera and have to transfer the photo. Plus, right now it doesn’t exactly deserve a picture, I should probably hide it from you guys…

I know. If I juryrig a mirror, in front of the computer, I can use it to take the picture with the computer camera, then no cable-finding required.

Now how large does the mirror have to be? Judging by the FOV of the iMac’s camera, and the distance I’d need to hold it to capture my whole desk, it’ll have to be about 3′ wide. Maybe I could use lenses and a curved mirror?

You know what, I’m gonna go get the camera.

I’ve gotten to the point in my game where you can betray your fellow rebels or not, and to celebrate I’m listening to Cry for Judas, by the Mountain Goats. You should all listen right now if you have some time!

If you want to play the game, you can play it HERE.

If you want me to play your game, leave me a comment with a link to it.

The Aliens Came — Postmortem

I had lots of fun this Ludum Dare! It was my second LD, my first in the compo, and I was quite happy with my results this time.

I wrote a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure game about a citizen in a city that’s been invaded by aliens, and having everything conspire to make you revolt.

What went wrong:

• The timer for choices was the source of my original idea, but didn’t fit in the final product as well as I’d like.
• The timer shouldn’t have been on all of the choices, but I didn’t have time to make a system to disable it for some multiple-choice scenes.
• I created too large of a story to make art for in the time limit. With drawing as fast as I could for almost the entire second day, I still had to reuse art for about 1/3 of the game.
• The default font was broken on one of my test computers, so I made my own. I’m not really qualified to design fonts however, so it’s a bit harder to read than it should be for large blocks of text.
• I didn’t automate the resource handling quite well enough, so that slowed down some of my work.

What went right:

• I came up with a very achievable idea that was still interesting.
• I built an extensible system straight off, so making the content for the game was easy.
• I wasn’t overconfident, and used Unity again. I got all my cross platform compatibility for free, even though I didn’t make much use of the Unity editor and only  used one GameObject for my game.
• I built a flexible level format, and was smart enough to leave the linking to the user, instead of trying to make a really complex automatic link maker.
• I came up with an art style that I could successfully produce 80-something pictures in in only 16 hours, and it looks quite nice too.

I had a great time this Ludum Dare, and I’ve played lots of fun games. I’m excited to see the results, and eagerly awaiting next time. I’ll be ready.

Tags: I will play your game, play my game, post-mortem, postmortem

I’m in this time! I’m entering the Compo, and this time I’ll be:

Putting off history homework.

Not doing math homework.

Maybe taking a break for English.

For my game development I’ll be using Unity3d and photoshop, plus some test editor.

I’ll be leaving sometime during the middle of Sunday, so this will be an interesting challenge.

I’ll be using Unity3d, as well as a few replacement functions for the Lerp/Slerp (add extrapolation).
Here’s a gist

In fact, I made a whole tiny animation framework that people can use with Unity.

Depending on the theme, I’ll be using:

• Photoshop
• Blender
• CrazyBump
• Who knows what else

Tags: im in, unity3d

In the past few months I dabbled with iOS development, and absolutely loved the [UIView AnimationWithDuration: …] methods. These use parametric methods, and let you do very nice simple animations in code, and since it’s so nice, I decided to make a similar system for Unity3d.

So today I spent a few hours working on a parametric animation solution, you can get it here. It’s very easy to use, and I recommend it to anyone who’s using Unity for this LD, it allows for very nice detail animations on objects. If you find yourself interpolating objects between two points, consider using this instead.

Also, I wrote some replacements for the interpolation system which let you use values outside the [0, 1] range.

• The animation system: https://gist.github.com/porglezomp/14e5c49bd7a386fa79cb
• The interpolation: https://gist.github.com/porglezomp/6db9942643daceffdfba

Tags: ld48, tools, unity, unity3d