Good morning everybody,

I just woke up and it’s time to get to work :). This will be my first LD, but not my first gamejam.  First time I will be doing a 2D game, a story and audio. What scares me the most? Creating music and a story.

My main speciality is programming, so all other content in a game scares me, really.

My toolset

• Unity3D  (with Visual Studio as IDE) with NGUI for UI.
• Pulseboy for music (http://www.pulseboy.com/ web based sequencer)
• MSPaint and GIMP for graphics (and possibly inkscape)
• Notepad for story development ;).

Good luck everybody!

Been working on a hospital room and some dialog.. Still a long way to go, time to implement some actual gameplay

Also created my first music ever, which includes.. whale sounds :).

The ratio of playing to watching is currently too low in my opinion :/.. I am afraid the cohesion of different parts of the game is not great enough, and I don’t think I can do much against it, hopefully adding the last minigame will help.

Here’s a low FPS gif of the rocket level

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/43693599/RocketGameplay.gif

Slowly finishing things up.. All I have to do now is rework a lot of the music, let’s see how that goes.. Here’s a teaser of the outro

Managed to get something done for the 48hr compo despite time limitations ;]

The goal is to get a score of 8 or higher, good luck!

Link to Sub Bomber

A short list of “tricks” I used this jam to manage. I only had a couple of hours to work on something, but I still consider it my best LD (disclaimer: it’s my second).

Try it here!

1. If you think you will not finish, change the game around. Cut scope, you can always hack in some gameplay if you are really out of time. In Sub Bomber the player jumps through gates and scores points. This was only put in the game the last hour before submission.
2.  Programmer and no time/skill in art? Keep it simple and add particles, in the development of Sub Bomber I would say a good 1/4th of my time went to the particles and it was worth it.
3. Your game doesn’t need a menu if it means you won’t finish your game because of it.
4. Performance sometimes doesn’t matter, in Sub Bomber the bubble-particles still spawn above the sea, they hide the next frame (you can see this). To do this it has to iterate past hundreds of particles and check the position, but in a jam game it doesn’t matter, what does matter is your time.
5. Using different instruments for different tracks with the same melody is a nice way to save a lot of time and prevent repetitiveness. It allowed me to create the music for sub bomber in 20 minutes (6 tracks).
6.  Changing the pitch of your music to around 50% tends to make for some nice game over music.

Oh and by the way, the highscore is 58 ;).

Last weekend I created Hello World, a game where you guide messages. Check it out here http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=23945 !

“Hello World” Gameplay

Play and rate here

I’m in.

Here’s a small list of tips you don’t read everywhere that I wrote up some LDs back:

1. Your game is probably too hard.  As the maker of a game, you are much more skilled in your game as you know exactly how it works and have played it a whole lot. Have your game playtested, even in a jam, and scale the difficulty down.
2. Add story skip functionality. Add skip functionality to intro’s and parts of the story (if your game has one). In my game the intro was not skippable, which was a big, big mistake.
3. Add level skip functionality (in my game I had a button show up after X failed attempts). This allows players that are struggling or simply don’t have the time to try many times to see the story/ending of your game regardless. This is not that hard to add and in my eyes is a must in story-driven games.
4. Add sound. Any sound is always better than no sound, if you are not an audio pro, consider recording things around you with your crappy microphone or generating sounds with bfxr. If you do it really well, it can make for a great experience all by itself.
5. Do one thing well. I often end up over-scoping in jams, it’s not so much that I didn’t put in every feature I wanted, it’s that the game does not do one thing very well, but does a lot of things. I think this problem is especially present in  the programming-end of the game developer spectrum.
6. Don’t finish with programmer art. Making art is not impossible for programmers, do plan to span some time on at least reasonable art. Keep it simple and add particles.
7. Build for Linux too. I’m not a Linux user myself, but many of jammers (especially the veterans (who vote on a lot of games and give great criticism)) are. There is no Unity Web Player for  Linux, so build for Linux!
8. Put instructions in the game, when the player needs it (first) . In my opinion this is so much better than putting a list on your submission page or at the very start of the game. Here are some examples of how it can be done.
9. 
10. Watch a stream of someone playing your game (or an IRL person). This is basically how I learned most of this, post-jam there a bunch of people streaming games, it’s a great opportunity to see someone struggle with things that you thought were intuitive/easy.
11. Changing the pitch of your music to around 50% tends to make for some nice game over music.
12. Using different instruments for different tracks with the same melody is a nice way to save a lot of time and prevent repetitiveness.
13. Your game doesn’t need a menu if it means you won’t finish your game because of it.
14. It’s OK to change your game idea around if it doesn’t feel right or you risk not being done in time.

Hope they help

This LD I’ll probably create a 2D game, as my 3D modeling skills stretches only from cubes to teapots.
Can’t really say what tools I will be using beforehand, here’s a rough list.

Language: Haxe, C#, TypeScript, Dart, Java
Game Engine/Framework: Unity3D, Phaser, THREE.js, OpenFL
2D Art: GIMP, PyxelEdit, MS Paint
Music: Sunvox, Reaper, Audiosauna
I’ll just pick whatever fits the project best .

See you in IRC

#noman

Tags: tips