Hi people,

Pretty excited about this jam thing. I’ll be using Photoshop and probably Camera4D to do some stuff with my good friends HK, Abe and Kuru.

Phew. It’s been two long days. But we’re done and you can now play our game there : http://www.reuno.net/balance/ I was in charge of the “cute” assets, the splashscreen, the website, and a few other things. Here’s some of it :

I hope you’ll like it!

My buddies links :

Abe – http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/author/abe
Reuno – http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/author/reuno
Kuru – https://www.facebook.com/pages/Art-of-Kuru/177891188907256
Mr_Hk_ – http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/author/mr_hk_

Alright, now that I’ve slept a little, time to introduce you to Shapeshifter Biker.

So in this game you’re a shapeshifter biker, all alone in a desolated world, chased by angry ducks in black trucks. To escape, you need to collect all the Animal Powers scattered across the land, in mysterious blue boxes.

Once you collect an Animal Power, you can shapeshift into that Animal for 10 seconds maximum. Some animals destroy enemies, some are invulnerable, some are scary, some can ride through lava, other can fly, some are invisible, and other are, well, surprising.

There are 20 different animals to collect, will you catch them all ?

I did everything myself, and the music is my band’s, Uniform Motion.  The songs you can hear (except for the title song obviously) are from our upcoming album, Five.

Play Shapeshifter Biker now !

I put together a short video showcasing the game :

And you can learn more about it on that little homepage I put together for it.

Third time’s a charm.

I had a lot of fun creating the startscreen for my game this time.

Overall I’ve been having a lot of fun this past weekend, I can’t wait for the next edition. You can give my game a try over there. See you next time!

Fourth Ludum Dare for me, solo again this time. I'll probably be doing something with Unity/Spine/Photoshop/Cinema4D or none of these, we'll see :)

So after 2 days I'm close to finishing this thing with as much stuff as I had planned initially. I'm glad I didn't go for an unreachable goal this time :)

The game is called Power Play, and you're the last rugbyman in a world overrun by robots, and need to beat them in a match of the old gentleman's game.

It features a few different enemy types, a kind of cool AI, and fun visual effects and animations. What's left to do is mostly balancing and UI polish.

Here's what it looked like this morning :

https://media.giphy.com/media/3o6vXKGKAdsNftFqzS/giphy.gif

And this is the AI being very smart at avoiding walls :

https://media.giphy.com/media/26n6O5U2Ch5TM9pJu/giphy.gif

I'm really glad I did this Ludum Dare :) It was my fourth time, and as usual it was a lot of fun. I did it on my own, at home for once (I used to go hang out with other jammers for company the previous times). It went pretty well! I never do these post mortem things but maybe it'll help someone to see how my jam went.

The game

The game is called PowerPlay, and it pits you as a rugbyman against a vast army of rugbybots, in a game of rugby. Well you have to get the ball on the other side, but apart from that the bots don't seem to care much about the actual rules. You can give it a try there : https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/39/power-play

Here's the trailer for it :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5cTizkWPeKM

Tools

As for most of my game projects these days (and for the past 3 years) I've used mostly Unity, Photoshop, Cinema4D and After Effects. I'm used to these, so I know what I can and can't do and how long it'll roughly take. I've also tried a few new softwares (new to me at least), which in retrospect is a bit stupid as I keep doing that same mistake, and it costs me valuable time. At the same time it's a fun occasion to learn some new things. I've experimented with 3DCoat this time, only to realize that even if it simplifies the texturing process, I'm still really bad at it. I've played with the newly released AssetForge, which is really promising but I've found the current lack of undo and copy paste really frustrating for anything other than small objects.

What went well

• I finished early. I had a finished product at the end of the second day. I used half of the last day to do some more playtests and tweak the difficulty ramp, and submitted early.

• I planned a good scope, the game that came out was pretty much what I had in mind at the beginning of the jam (which is a first for me, I usually branch out at some point). The only two things I didn't add were highscore saves and achievements. I wanted to support web and native builds and was worried I'd run into trouble with the save paths and stuff. Too risky even with a few hours ahead of me, and for little value for a jam.

• I used github, just like for all my other projects, and creating issues, crossing them off, creating small milestones and planning the next day or the next few hours is something that really keeps me going.

So many closed issues!

I started using Github's issues years ago as a team but found out that even when working solo it's a great way to free brain space for more useful stuff.

• I used the recently released Cinemachine for the camera. It took some getting used to as it's not very well documented right now, especially the API side, but once you get how it works, this thing's amazing. I still don't understand a few aspects of it, like how you can't just move a camera around via its handles, but it's great nonetheless.

• I did some AI and random stuff and it went well. Every gamejam I make, I try to remind myself of two rules : no random, no AI. I managed to break these rules everytime so far, and this one is no exception. It's just so fun to code! I'm really proud of my wall-avoiding AI this time. It's only 10 lines of code but it does the trick I think.

It's basically just two raycasts and if one hits something the bot will turn in the other direction. Kind of like an insect's antenna I guess. Don't take my word for it I know nothing about insects.

• I didn't burn out. I managed to eat and shower twice a day, got 6-7 hours of sleep each night, wasn't too anxious or bored. I'm pretty exhausted now but these 3 days went alright.

• The music is awesome. I didn't make it myself so I guess I'm allowed to say it. As for my past gamejams, my Uniform Motion's bandmates helped me with the soundtrack, and I've been listening to it on repeat (for testing reasons) and it hasn't driven me mad yet.

What could have gone better

• I lost a lot of time modeling stuff. I'm not really good at it, and I didn't plan too well. For example, I modeled an entire stadium, and it's barely visible in game. The thing even has a roof. I left it there thinking maybe there'd be a camera effect to show it. Yeah right. Plus it's super ugly.

2 hours poorly spent

• I could have used more testing time. I'm not satisfied with the current difficulty curve, but tweaking that takes ages and there just wasn't enough time. That's the really hard part when working alone on such a short deadline I guess. I managed to get feedback from friends on various Slacks, but it's not the same as having someone on the team that can test builds regularly. Maybe next time I'll force someone to play through my bug ridden builds :)

• I wasn't very good at self promotion. I really like creating stuff but posting wip shots, writing blog posts to showcase the stuff is really boring for me, so once again, I could really have improved on that.

So yeah, I'm really glad I did another Ludum Dare. Now I can't wait for the next one. I think in the meantime I'll keep working on PowerPlay. I think it has potential and could be really fun on mobile.

Oh and if you want to rate the game (I really could use the feedback), here's the link again : https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/39/power-play/

I'm in, for the 5th time now. Solo again, and I'll try to go for the compo for a change. I'll be using some or all of these : Unity, Spine, Photoshop, After Effects, Blender, Cinema4D, Medium, Tilt and Figure.

So this was my 5th Ludum Dare, and my first compo. All in all I think it went well. Modeling with the Oculus Rift gave me a massive headache on day 2, but apart from that it was pretty smooth. I hope you'll like the game!

Soccer Racing combines all the fun of soccer with the thrill of a racing game. Grab the ball, go through all the checkpoints while avoiding the opposing team, and go for the goal!

Give the game a try! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/soccer-racing/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZh4ls0PTQc

Controls :

• left/right : turn
• space : tackle (without the ball) / shoot (with the ball)

Credits :

All code, visuals, sound FX and music by me. Created in 47 hours using Unity, Photoshop, After Effects, Medium, Figure, Blender, Cinema4D, AssetForge, XSplit and Github. And Spotify in the background.

Screenshots :

7th Ludum Dare, here we go!