Just fixing typos for our game but please feel free to play it! 

Critical Failure

Hi there, we linked our game last night but were too tired to write a proper post mortem.

When we heard the theme was “minimalism” our entire team groaned, as it was the one theme we had all down voted. However,  we had to press on so we brain stormed to come up with our own take on minimalism – as you play the game, rather than gaining upgrades and the game becoming more complex, you sacrifice abilities to stay alive. By the end of the game you are surviving on -minimal- power! A little tenuous but it gave us an idea we could all be enthusiastic about.

Yay, you killed the initial boss!

Play Critical Failure (Flash)

Overall we are very happy with the game. It came together easily in the end, however because both our designer and programmer had to work Monday, we didn’t get the time we would have liked to polish the game. The control system needs tweaking, some of the dialogue text is buggy and not synced correctly, and we didn’t have time to play through the game enough to test the ending (I think at the moment it returns to the main menu too soon). That said, we did get a lot of features implemented – all the side panel buttons work and give interesting functions (rather than just stat changes) and the game is enjoyable to play if you can see past the issues.

We have tried to make games together before but never made much progress, mostly because 2 or 3 of our team work in game development and they often don’t have the time and energy to make games out of work as well. So LD was a great chance for us all to get a finished product to show what we can achieve. As an artist I was amazed at watching my images come to life and start moving – it was like magic.

If we were to do it again? Hopefully we would get a theme that was more to our tastes. That being said, I do understand now why people wanted minimalism – very simple but experimental games keep the features list as low as possible for polish and testing. Given a second time around I would look for ideas that can not only be completed in the time, but also finished up and properly tested as well.

Would love to Ludum Dare again!

– Sam, lead artist.

Hi so we spent the morning coming up with a theme we could work with (it was really hard with this theme!) and we’ve decided to make a game about maintaining a Screen in a 40’s movie theatre, making sure customers are behaving and keeping it clean.  I’ve started coding the player controls and Sam is working away on the graphics and Becky on the music   Here’s some WIP on the graphics.

So we’ve been working 10 hours pretty much solid so far.  As always…

Sam is doing an art

Alex is doing a program

And Becky is doing a sound

Actual game  update soon!

Just doing the last odds and ends, nearly time to upload our game, Screen One!  😀

Sam covered most of the issues in our project in her write-up.  I wanted to talk a bit about the mechanics and how they evolved fairly chaotically.  Most of our ideas were “flavour first” as in they were inspired by the setting rather than invented to fulfil a mechanical purpose.  When we came up with the concept we were saying things like “maybe something ridiculous happens like the cinema gets attacked by bees or a giant snowman” rather than “what combination of interactions would provide an interesting challenge”.  We talked about having an intermission, adverts and a newsreel like in real-world 1940’s cinema so that we could inject some narrative into it and tell a bit of a story.  I wanted to have that classic trailer horn sound accompanied by a giant silhouette of a snowman projected over the audience!  What we ended up with was something a bit more abstract and puzzley akin to zoo-keeper.  If we’d decided early on that this was essentially a puzzle game I think we would have spent more time trying to come up with column/row interactions and then pulling a bunch of relevant real-world explanations out of our asses.  We might have also made something less confusing!  But then on the other hand we might have lost some of the style and charm which has received some good feedback so to be perfectly honest I’m quite glad we didn’t do that and instead decided it would be cute if there were bunnies with long ears

One thing we’re going to continue to do in future jams is make sure we have somebody working on sound effects!  It makes a world of difference adding appropriate music and sound effects to a game and I think the most noticeable change when we realised the game was suddenly going to be fun to play was the first time I ran the game after adding Becky’s sound effects.  So adorable!  Also without the music we wouldn’t have come close to conveying the mood we wanted would we?  <3

There’s still a fair few bugs we’re aware of and the clutter on the screen is definitely a bit of a situation overload but I’m really happy with what we managed to create!  In the meantime I’m enjoying playing other people’s entries and seeing lots of interesting concepts come out of a very difficult theme! -x-

~~~~RATE AND PLAY~~~~~

More like…

Illudum…

NATI!

Thanks to everyone who has voted on our game and left comments! If you’ve not yet played it, this is your last chance to tell Mr. Fox to shut up.

Rate our game!

Not mine but if you want a quick, easy, 8/16-bit sound generator I came across this today http://www.superflashbros.net/as3sfxr/

Started making drawing concept art and making assets this morning, going well so far!

Now needs arms, tails, possibly butts.

Feeling tired now, but only a few more hours to go… UI and particle effects from now until closing time.

“This time let’s take it easy and make a simpler game” – famous last words of a Ludum Dare 32 participant.

What Have We Created?! is not only the title of our game, but also sums up some of the emotions we felt towards it a few hours prior to submission. Our game idea was deceptively simple – let the player create a monster and unleash it on a city – but actually proved a lot more fiddly to implement that we had anticipated, and we were caught at the 11th hour panicking about what could be cut out so we could submit on time.

What went right – Becky’s music came out really well this time, mashing up the “Bwooooom” movie trailer sound to create a really atmospheric track for the monster launch. Alex achieved an impressive amount code wise, made all the more impressive by the fact that she only started using Unity a few weeks ago. Even if the game could have used a few more hours tweaking, there is a lot going on behind the scenes with the monster building section. In terms of graphics, I am pretty pleased with the how the cityscape turned out.

What went not so right  –  There was a lot the never got put in the game that we would have liked to add or finish. We wanted to put tanks and choppers into the city portion of the game (indeed the graphics were done) but we ran out of time to implement the enemies properly. Also its pretty clear from the feedback we’ve had that its unclear to some players quite how the monster fits together and that there are too many of certain kinds of tiles spawning – easy things for us to fix but we simply didn’t have time to get that level of polish. Plus a million-billion bugs.

Had I done the project again, I would have held off making the lab background so busy – it would have worked as well or better with a much simpler design, leaving me with more time to help Alex with exporting and tweaking.

This is our third LD, and in many ways this project was our most ambitious. Our aim was to beat our previous rankings (#42 overall for both entries) but judging from the feedback so far, it seems our game has been less well received than before. If nothing else, this project has been a success in helping us learn the work flow for Unity, so fingers crossed our next jam will go a little smoother.

And next time we will be making a pong clone.

Please play and rate our game.
Thanks to those who have already done so.

Or try here for a slightly tweaked post jam version.