This will be my first ludum dare.
I’ve always wanted to participate but just never had the time during school.

I’m a interaction designer + developer by trade, but I have more fun trying to make games.

My thoughts for tools at the moment are…

• Unity 3D for making the actual game
• Photoshop for backgrounds, textures, and quick comps of HUD/UI stuff
• A white-board for mad scientist style sketches
• Fruity Loops for music and sound effects
• Cinema 4D for modeling, and possibly a little animating
• TextMate if I can find a way for it to play nice with Unity

If anyone is interested, I plan on live-micro-blogging my process on twitter.
I’m @radpants

Good luck, friends!

Random progress share time!

The story:

Imagine you are a lowly service bot on an asteroid mine deep in the void.
You awake to find things are just all kinds of askew. All the other service bots in your storage area are now just empty shells, their AI’s obliterated from existence. Someone seems to have changed the decor as well, someone with a fondness for dark spooky hallways, creepy red lights, and strange arcane symbols. You attempt to ask the central core just what in the world is going on, but you get no response. Odd, considering it’s running at nearly 100% capacity. It’s thinking about something, something incredibly complicated, and it has been for quite some time. Well this just no good at all. You fall back onto emergency protocols and voyage out into the facility to discover what is going on around here.

Gameplay:

Dodge things that attempt to fly at you or shoot things at you.
Shoot back at them to remove them from the equation.

Obligatory Screenshot:

Early prototype, no textures yet and the models are temporary block forms as well.
That light in the top left is your headlight, the levels will be much darker than shown here ( had to keep the lights on for debugging )
Very simple enemy shown here. Wanders around until it spots you, turns it’s red light of doom on and rams you, spins out for 5 seconds and goes back into patrol mode.
I’m thinking the collision might damage them as well, so perhaps they only have 3 hits in them… or some such thing.

I haven’t a clue as to how far production on assets is going to go. Levels are made out of 4 cookie-cutter pieces and one special main area.
Plan is for 6 types of enemies, but each one needs a model and textures so… yeahhhh…
Plan is also for upgradable weapons and maneuverability, but that’s not too high on the list.

Tools:

So far I’ve used Unity for the engine, Unitron for script editing, and Cinema 4D for the super simple player model.

Okay, I’m now officially entirely verbose. If anyone has any feedback though, feel free to be as brutal as you like.

Thanks, and good luck to all!

Going with a springy grappling-hook platformer style game.

Using chingu this time around, it’s pretty neat so far.

Picture time!

I just want to say… collision detection is really annoying. It’s finally working now, albiet a bit hack-y.

Anywho, here you can see the little robot in spring-swinging action. It’s actually a little fun to fly around using the grappling hook, although you can slide and hop around as in most platformers. My thought for gameplay is that you will have to pick up crates, while carrying a crate you can only move via grappling hook, you must deposite crate into… crate… depository…

…yes.

pics!

Hello again!

This is actually reaching the point where it feels like a game (rather than an exercise is random development).

You can run & hop around, as well as use the grappling hook. I spent some time refining the springy-ness of the hook and it helped a ton, still needs work though. There are now crates placed throughout the level, which you can pick up. While carrying a crate you move much slower, and can’t really jump (like 2 pixels high). You can, however, use the grappling hook to move around quickly. I’m thinking there could be some neat gameplay there, easily get to a crate, then figure out how to get out carrying it. After grabbing the crate, you must bring it back to the crate drop area (which shows a count-down of how many needed to beat the level).

After thinking about it a bit, I’m not sure they should be crates. Because I mean… who really cares about crates? Maybe they should be kittens, or chinchillas, assorted cute furry animals? Perhaps they all got loose in 2110 and it’s your job to save them? Hmm… perhaps…

TODO:

• Help / Instructions panels for intro level
• Sound effects
• Music
• More tile types
• Design a few levels
• Make it so after beating a level, it advances to the next
• Perhaps change crates into adorable pixely kittens

Screenshot time!

Any comments, questions, suggestions, or random statements are much appreciated.

Thanks!

Things are nearly there!

Sound effects: done, Music: done, Carrying crates around: done, Dropping them off to beat a level: done, Go to next level after that: done, Deprive self of sleep: DONE.

Sadly I have yet to replace the crates with kittens or chinchillas, though I would still very much like to. Robotic Kitten Rescue 2110!
Or maybe the crates should be made of gold. Everyone likes gold… righhhht? Hm.

Anywho, now to build some fun levels and figure out how to deploy this as an OSX App/ Windows exe.

Screenshots of dooooom!