Start time is 2am for me, joy. 
I will likely be using OpenSLUDGE to build the game on, with Blender/GIMP for graphics. All depends on the theme. I might end up just doing a browser game instead, if it ends up being more suited to the theme.
Anyhoo, see y’all there! (figuratively speaking, that is)
Regards,
Rusty Broomhandle
The game ended up being a considerable amount shorter than initially intended. I also did not have time to make clipping maps for the scenes, so the rover will sometimes be seen riding over things he’s supposed to be going behind.
I’m fairly happy with what’s there though and would like to expand it and make it into a complete experience, perhaps even a bit beyond what the original scope was intended.
EDIT: Oh, and I added a Windows installer for ease – link below.
LD Entry Page: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-23/?action=preview&uid=10871
Windows Installer: http://screwylightbulb.com/NixInstaller.exe
Last time I did not quite finish because I spent too much time on the graphics. The game engine I used was OpenSLUDGE, which made the game creation part easy, so I felt the “substance” had to come from the writing and look. If I had to go back and do it again… I probably would end up doing the same though, and in LD24 I see myself making the same mistake – I know no other way. So my new plan is this: Ahem ahem…
First up, going for the Jam instead of the 48 hour compo. Secondly, I am getting help, but this is where it might get a bit interesting. I am co-owner of a Minecraft (& other) community at http://indiesquish.com/ and we have some talented builders on there. I also have been playing with the idea of using Minecraft as an oversized voxel editor, the results of which are shown in the pic below. Notice how the final output does not resemble the original build.
I convert the Minecraft world into a Wavefront object using a util called mcobj, and then render it in Blender. I use orthographic rendering because I like it, so nyah.
The idea is to have our whole community participating in the event, building buildings, landscapes, characters, spaceships, whatever is required from scratch. We’ll have several live streams going, and several time lapse recordings. It’ll be a grand experiment.
Here’s a standard flatworld with two villages:
So in summary:
– Game built using OpenSLUDGE engine.
– Voxel art drawn using Minecraft by a bucketload of excited kids (and a few big kids)
– Converted to mesh using mcobj
– Game graphics rendered in Blender
– Sound, will get back to ya. 😉
IMPORTANT: No assets from Minecraft end up in the final output. It’s just coloured cubes with no textures on them.
Doing the Jam in Ludum Dare 24 turned out to be an experiment of sorts. A proof of concept. We wanted to see if we could make a game, but also involve anyone in the Minecraft community we run at indiesquish.com. We’d gather all the troops and set them upon some empty worlds to build sets for use in the game. They’d have a custom texture pack that eliminated all the textures, leaving just coloured cubes, looking very similar to the final output after rendering the scenes in Blender.
All this turned out exactly as planned. They showed up, they planned and built a grand assortment of buildings, NPCs, monsters and UI elements.
The theme was “evolution”, which I naturally assumed would result in loads of high concept stuff from other devs that I would not be able to do. The engine I used is intended for 2D point & click adventure games, so we had to do something that stuck to those mechanics. The plan was to build the “evolution” part into the plot, and make a simple RPG with Japanese style turn-based combat. Thus Lepton’s Quest was born.
Sadly, as the end of the 72 hours approached, we started leaving out more and more of the planned features, with the aim of at least shipping something by the end of it. And we did. Not great, but as a proof of concept I think it worked well.
What went well
1. The artwork. A bucketload of players showed up to help with the building, while our best builder Nidhux coordinated most of it. We’ll post some videos from the livestream at some point.
2. Livestreaming everything. We had a livestream on twitch that showed the building and development work. It helped builders visualise their construction against the rendered output, and generally kept everyone motivated.
3. Community. We hadn’t given the sound/music any thought beforehand, and had several people volunteering to do music and sounds. Kas/Kong also hopped in on day 3 to create the lovely into and outro.
What was left out
1. Combat system. It was to be a simple turn-based system. You have two attacks and one “drink potion” action. You get to pick one per turn. First is a basic damage attack with a chance to miss. The second is a low-damage attack with a chance to stun.
2. Monster encounters. The community built some awesome monsters, and in the spirit of the “evolution” theme made variants on each type of creature. It would also feature random livestock around the village which would become mutated monstrosities.
3. NPC animations. This was never going to be too complicated, just enough to make them less static.
3. An underground aquaduct system. Down the well at the end would have taken you to an aquaduct system. You’d have had to defeat a boss monster (two headed crocodile) before being able to free the villagers.
4. Some sound engineering. The levels are way off… soft this, loud that.
5. Flavour. The plan was to add more flavour-dialogue to NPCs and add things for Lepton to look at and comment on.
6. Some added plot exposition. There was actually more plot to it, but we skipped some parts.
Tags: postmortem
I was going to skip this one, but changed my mind. Will be doing the compo.
Depending on what the game ends up being, it’ll either be Unity, OpenSLUDGE or just web/Javascript, graphics made with GIMP/Blender. Music with… dunno yet. I’ll hum a tune!
We’re doing the Jam again.
The creation process will be the same as we did for Lepton’s Quest : Build voxel art in Minecraft, use voxel art in game. It’ll be Unity as the engine this time round though.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IaHRC7z5rD4
http://indiesquish.com/leptons-quest/
Going to do the compo this time round.
Will likely be in Unity, and depending on the game, I *might* possibly use Twine and the Twine/Unity parser thingy I made for http://makerseden.screwylightbulb.com/ – it’s nothing too fancy, but we do plan to release a starter project for people who want to make similar games. Graphics will be GIMP/Blender.
No idea about sound… might just record some armpit farts and call it good.
See you around this weekend – have fun.
The Indie Squish Minecraft community is entering ye olde Jam again, doing the asset creation the same as we did the last two times – by building voxel stuff in Minecraft.
This was the first one we did:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IaHRC7z5rD4
Likely will be a Unity3D game, music done in heck-knows-what.
Once again, we’ve utilised our lovely Minecraft community (mostly children, we run a family-friendly server) to help us build our game assets for our LD jam. We’ve decided to make a Zaxxon-like Shmup with six levels, two enemy ship types per level and one boss fight at the end of each level. All game assets were built inside Minecraft, then exported through Blender, stripped of textures, and finally plonked into Unity for the actual game-making.
Amazingly we wrangled 20 – 30 super excited kiddies into building our levels and sticking to our build rules (mostly), and got all of the building done in one day. Now for the most time-consuming bit; putting it all into a game.
The Story:
You’re the pilot of a little spaceship flying through space. Your ship gets caught up in a time-space anomaly and shatters, leaving you in one smaller version of your ship with the rest of your ship parts scattered across different dimensions. In order to recover your ship parts, you need to fly through the dimensions (connected via portals), shoot down the enemies, and recover each part – and each part will add to your ships’ abilities and let you complete the final stages of each dimension.
Here’s an early early version of our ‘castle’ level;
And a couple of Vines of the almost complete Ocean level;
It’s time to kick bubblegum and chew ass!
I guess I’m in. Probably will just Unity3D it up as usual with a bit of Blender/GIMP thrown in for good measure.
Over 30 celcius predicted this weekend though – so might stick to working at night, being heat-averse. I should just move to Svalbard or something. I hear they have great internet there. 😀
The IndieSquish Minecraft community will participate again, using the same dirty trickses as the other times.
– Build voxel art in Minecraft
– Animation/rigging in Blender/Maya
– Build game in Unity
Maybe this time we’ll actually finish! 😀
You are the villain monster!
I felt this was worth a post since this is probably the most complete game we’ve submitted since we started doing the Jam using our particular formula.
For those unaware, we run a kid-friendly/parent-friendly (well supervised) Minecraft server called IndieSquish, and every so often we enter Ludum Dare as a community. All the in-game assets are built on the Minecraft server by anyone who wishes to participate, and we do try and use every single thing that gets made. These items then get exported to a format that can be used by Maya/Blender and animated there. The end result is a voxel-like art style.
Including myself, 31 people showed up on the weekend to help build the village and monsters. The youngest, as far as I know, was 9.
In progress shot at the end of Saturday.
Not sure why time worked out better. We usually try to aim for as simple a concept as possible, but inevitably we always run out of time. On the development side, some things that I thought would take long- like guard patrols and vision cones, were quick, and other things that should really be simple- like the “hold down key to search container” mechanic took longer.
Another reason I thought would probably contribute to wasted time is that I built the game using an experimental build of Unity on Linux – but too did not seem to slow things down. There was even enough time to add in sound – usually the first thing to get get culled when the deadline hits.
Since I don’t have a recipe for success, I’m going to go with: We got lucky!
Hope to get equally lucky next time.
Using Unity and a bunch of free software. Should probably get some rest before we kick this sucker off!
Also, while I have your attention, go play my free game I just recently released. ktnx
https://screwylightbulb.itch.io/kith-tales-from-the-fractured-plateaus-issue-1
It would appear we're in for the jam. :) Good luck to all.
I'm in! Will use Unity and already made a blank project. So now we wait. :)
Music (if any) likely using sunvox with sound (if any) with bxfr. I'll frickin beatbox if I have to!
I will be using this upcoming LD to field test my in-development IF tool, Tvain-B. I am inviting others who are curious to also maybe try it. The main goal of it is to create easy to parse json data that can be used in multiple parsers, so that narrative and writing workflow can be decoupled from the gamey parts of your game.
It's 100% usable, but what is missing is documentation. I will likely just post a quick video to show how it works in the absence of proper docs (which are coming).
Also, I currently only have two web based parsers ready for it, and one proof of concept one written as a mod for the game Kitsune Tails, which is in lua so I will be porting that over to LÖVE. I also have a half-baked port for Godot, but I have very little Godot experience, so it's a bit rough. Either way I will post everything I have before the jam starts.
In the mean time, if you want to you can try it out at:
Edit:
Here's an example parser for javascript/web:
https://gist.github.com/screwylightbulb/bbf23e93d48b9e019f72aec076f9dca8
Edit 2:
Blegh, was going to write some docs, but feeling a bit sick. Getting some sleep instead.
