Hello guys.

We’re participating Jam for the second time, hope we’ll finish this game.

 

Tools:

• Xna / Monogame (with port to html5 via JSIL)
• Photoshop
• Graphics Gale
• Custom Level Editor

Check out our game here

We’ve tried to make a rather complicated rogue-like game with abilities, leveling and random dungeons generation at our previous LD entry, but were too late. This time we decided to make something simpler and ended up with a platformer. It happened to be not as simple as we planned, we’ve designed 22 levels, but didn’t add them all before deadline.

Code:
We’ve decided not to use Unity this time again (We thought about that, though) so we had to make everything from the start and ended up with a Windows version only. We had our own level editor, which was rather helpfull. We had to adapt it to our needs though, which consumed a lot of our time.

Gamedesign:
We’ve changed our game mechanics on the run several times. We had an idea of that oasis-city in the middle of the nowhere, but we had completely no idea how to make our game interesting to play, so we decided to left our atmospheric adventure behind and ended up with a hardcore platformer like “Super Meat Boy” or “I wanna be the guy” with double jumps.

Level Editor:
we had our own level editor, which was originally made for another game, and it worked well, we’ve made rather complicated levels with ease.

Graphics:
It was made by my younger brother. He made a lot of work, there are 116 textures in total. We had some argues about the prefered colour scheme, but then kuler.adobe.com helped us a lot.

Sound:
One of us wrote three tracks to use in this game in his spare time, and all the sounds were taken of bfxr and freesound.org

Tags: #LD48 #LD29, postmortem

Hello everyone and happy new year!

We are two brothers from Moscow (Russia) who had almost no experience in game development 3 years ago. We’ve been participating in Ludum Dare for the hmmm… 10th time, I guess and thanks for LD we gained a lot of game development experience over these years. We started from shitty 2D pixel-art graphics on XNA engine ending with 3D multiplayer games with PBR materials.  Here are our previous most successful and less successful entries.

And this time we made a first-person puzzle game.

Play Lighthouse Mystery

Lighthouse Mystery. Ludum Dare #37

Read more about development below:

This LD’s theme was ‘One Room’ and this time we decided to make a first-person game so we end up with some sort of puzzle game. But one room literally wasn’t enough for us to make a great puzzle so we decided how to stick to the theme without forcing player to stay in one room actually. And then we got an idea of “one room, multiple exits”. After discussing the idea we end up with the door like in “Howl’s Moving Castle” animated film by Hayao Miyazaki. It had a special lever which changed the destination of the door.

Gameplay

First draft of our idea

So we made a similar one door. Now we had a concept of multiple external enviroments and one room which was a start and an exit point at the same time, perfect for a puzzle game. But player needed something to do in the ‘outside’ world so we modified our door a bit and created a concept of a key which is actually a cube charged with a specific color. Each color leads to a different world and is consumed by the door after changing door’s destination. So player now had a purpose in the outside worlds: to charge his key by the color of the next world. And we just needed to add some puzzle component into the worlds itself. We took some inspiration from Portal and Talos Principle games and decided to use quite simple laser mechanics with emitters, mirrors and receivers. Last one designed to charge player’s key. And also we added an impossible gravity, just because I had an extra time.

Setting

We really wanted to make something aesthetically clean, light and nice in the outside world. At least we tried We created floating islands with nice grass on it and added a huge accent in each level – a lighthouse, it is inspired by Bioshock Infinite time-line concept with lighthouses:

We also placed multiple lighthouses on each level :)

Development

The game was developed by me and my younger brother in 72 hours, i was doing all of the programming and unity level design while he was modelling and drawing stuff. We already had an experience participating in ludum dare so our time management had no issues and let us to develop the game without hurrying. For my opinion, the key for it is prioritising all tasks and distincting details from core gameplay and doing most important things first. We didn’t hurry at all, cause we know that it could be worse.

Part of our prioritized checklist (on a real whiteboard)

You can checkout our timelapse videos:

The only problem of our game was the sound. We are not skilled in sound design and the only person who could help us with that was unreachable. But i still wanted to try create sound myself without downloading it from freesounds.org or whatever, so a took a mic and an and started making noises in front of it. It took about 6 hours for me for recording, postprocessing and putting results into the game. The result is not that bad, i think. Unfortunately we had not enough time for recording music but we are still working on it.

This is how we recorded sounds. At least we tried.

Conclusion

I think we succeeded this time. We’ve done what we’ve planned and pretty happy with the result. Probably we should continue to develop our game but it still requires a lot more work to be done.
What do you think about the game? Please write your opinion here or in comments to the game itself.

Btw, our source code is open and published on github.

 

Play Lighthouse Mystery