Very excited! First Ludum Dare!
My weapons of choice:
Unity3d
Autodesk 3DS Max
Adobe Fireworks
Audacity
Hotpockets
Progress will be blogged here at my site
See you guys on the other side! 😀
Whew! It’s over. That was one hell of a jam. Evolution was a challenging theme to condense into a game in such short amount of time.
My game Next Generation was definitely an ambitious life simulator game for only myself to do.
Lessons learned: If you want to enter the compo, when you take your “break,” don’t take it at 8 pm and play the Game of Thrones board game till 6 am the next day. And don’t bet drinks while you play either. Just don’t do it.
But I had so much fun! This idea was actually planned to get scrapped. But with all the research I was doing on the biology of reproduction, hereditary traits, and evolution I couldn’t help but have the urge to create it! I don’t think I’ve every learned so much and it took a game jam to do that.
In traditional at home game jam fashion, my diet consisted of only burritos, pizza, hotpockets, and beer.
I’ll be updating the game all tonight and after.
Anyway, Next Generation needs tons of feedback. What are you confused about? Where did you quit? Where did you get stuck? How did it crash? What did you like? What do you want more of? All that jazz.
This community is amazing. The IRC chat was wonderful, polite, and funny. I love you guys.
Hodor!
-George Katsaros
http://www.georgekatsaros.com/
@FedRive
Well, there goes another Ludum Dare. I’ve noticed a trend; every game jam I complete, the next day I feel incredible. Even with the accumulative 10 hours of sleep I got over the weekend, it somehow isn’t a problem. Almost like I came back from camping but with a different kind of leftover stench.
Now that Highway 00101 is out, I wanted to reflect a bit on it’s conception, development, and execution. The team consisted of just my friend / roommate John Park and myself. Since we work late, we didn’t really stat throwing ideas out until ~9pm. After 2 hours of debating, getting worked up, and beer we agreed that the game should consist of 1 button. Examples proving this could be fun were the GAMMA IV 1 button games and countless iOS games (Canabalt, Gauge, Jet Pack Joy Ride). What’s more minimalist that 1 button? Well, there’s 0 buttons but I didn’t want to defend that idea lol.
Art inspirations we liked were pop pieces with minimalist executions such as Daft Punk’s Electroma, Drive, and Kavinsky. The 3d models were made “polygonal” and exposed geometry because it was quick, got the point across, and kinda popular right now! It served a lot of our purposes. The pallet was from Kavinsky’s music videos and Watchmen’s Dr. Manhattan Mars issues.
The concept of the mechanics came to me while we were driving home. There’s a game my mother and I used to play were on the highway, you’d simply try and avoid using the breaks. By predicting traffic ahead of you and either accelerate, decelerate (by not pressing the gas pedal), and merge, a small and economically efficient game was made (it was also a way to save gas and our brakes lol). This combined with the fact that driving can be a very unwinding and relaxing experience gave the game a purpose.
The text displayed is reflective of the driver’s thoughts. As they drive, they actually progress through the Kübler-Ross stages of depression. The stage, dependent on the distance the player drove, progresses and the difficulty (spawning rate and speeds applied to Ai Cars) reflect that stage. In the end, the player’s monologue reflects and finishes the Acceptance stage. Bit of a positive ending.
The audio, well the audio is just cool! We wanted a Kavinsky-like track and have the world react to it. The pyramids spawned will change their scale based on the Bass level in the song. I created my first seamless-loop script that was smart enough to know when to loop and when to progress the track. I was super pleased with it and had the game DJ for me while I ate my meals, haha
As we play tested, two things were wanted: merging and “something else.” Since the logic was already created for the AI cars, I gave the player the ability to merge. With only hours left and a fraction of my strength remaining, I asked what would be an easy and yet fun addition to add with minimal bugs? Ramps was what I decided on. The logic for spawning things was already created, so with a quick copy / paste and rename, a basic scaled cube added something a bit more exciting for the impatient player.
While this game was meant to be a very low key (almost relaxing) game, I buckled in fear thinking of players who just wanted to go fast would find this too simple.
In the end, I’m happy the damn thing runs! The fact that people are playing it makes me ecstatic and the positive comments are getting me all emotional inside. I feel like I’m watching a Pixar movie with all these warm feelings in me. Anyway, thank you all for any amount of time you donated to our work. Most of all, thank you for making great games and being such incredible people. It’s events like these that restore my faith in humanity.
A link to our game for convenience – Highway 00101
-Hodor!