Been looking at Ludum Dares for a while now, me and a friend finally decided to try it. Both programmers so you can only expect the best art you've ever seen. We shall most likely be using Unity for the game, and either Blender or GIMP for art assets depending on dimension of the game. Here's hoping. :smile:

First day of daring was exciting and infuriating all in one go. We have made steady progress with our game using the Unity Engine, which is an escape room, our interpretation of the small world theme. Progress made so far:

-Came up with the idea and design

-Designed puzzles and game flow

-Whiteboxed the room

-Created the camera controls

-Created the inventory for items

-Created code to create all the objects in the game

-Added a text description to the UI

-Coded a system to handle what the mouse is clicking on, and to zoom the camera on objects.

-Added a music system

-Added a splash screen and buttons to enter main scene.

-Created simple models for most objects in the room (Texturing needed)

I think that covers it all, features we still intend to add are:

*Picking up objects and storing in the inventory

*Using objects in the room to progress

*Adding the puzzle systems, such as buttons and codes

*Texturing

*Different descriptions based on items in inventory

*Ending the game

There's probably loads of extra stuff that I cant think of right now, but I think we can pull it off. Its been fun working with my teammate @joshua-sellers and looking forward to day 2, right now though, time to sleep.

P.S I would post better images or Gifs of the progress, but I cba tonight, so you just get this little sneak peek tonight

http://imgur.com/a/DVJrC

Have fun everyone

So its fair enough to say, this day had a lot more issues than yesterday. My teammate was caught up for a few hours, and then there was lots of confusion with codes. Not using very good source control, Google Drive, for the project has been hell. Lesson learnt, set up source control beforehand next jam.

In Regards to the game, progress made since yesterday includes:

• Picking up and storing objects in inventory

• Using objects and removing them from inventory

• More Models/Textures

• 4 Puzzles completed, almost all objects added

Few things left to do, some big though, but I think we can pull it off:

• Get Sounds and Music working

• Texture room

• 2-3 puzzles left

• Menus and End screen

Who knows if it all gets done, but I believe in the heart of the cards. If you could only see the mess of code I've made for interacting with objects, its horrific. All the hardcoding. I know its inefficient and there's probably better and easier ways to do it. But I don't know them yet and time is an enemy.

Final Day here we come.

A tasty sneak peek at a build earlier tonight:

Before you get any ideas, they are meant to be statues of snakes, forgive my programmer art

So we are almost complete, last things we gotta do is add the menus, a sound and some descriptions and it should be all good to go. I will discuss more in the post mortem, but its quite a short game, as a number of the puzzles were cut. This game won't die after the Jam, though, so keep watching for updates.

We have now completed our game for the jam, a cool little escape room game made in Unity. We had to cut some puzzles for time, but I hope you'll enjoy our game. Feel free to leave your thoughts.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/the-room

This has been a wonderful experience, with ups and downs, and i'll be doing a proper post-mortem tomorrow. But for now, i'll hope you'll enjoy , and I can't wait to play some of the other amazing games from the Dare. :D

Thought i'd finally get round to writing the post-mortem for the game we developed during the dare. This will be my first time writing one of these, so be kind.

Our completed game page: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/the-room

Team

Our team for Ludum Dare was just me and @joshua-sellers , who are both programmers who studied at university together, and decided to eventually try one of these Ludum Dares. We had to use my little knowledge of Blender and Gimp for the models and art in the game, as we had no one with proper art experience.

Theme

When the theme was announced, we had a few ideas, some of them building up civilization on a small planet. We eventually settled on an escape room idea, because we both like escape rooms and puzzles, because its only one small room, we felt it fit our interpretation of the theme, and it seemed like something we could achieve.

Day one (Hope)

We started quite late in the day, around in the afternoon, mainly cos we are night owls. We made steady progress with a number of core systems in the game, such as the camera, interactions and inventory, as well as a complete whitebox and most of the models. We used Google Drive to save and share our project, but more about that later. We finished working on it around midnight and were really happy with out progress so far.

Day two (MIA)

The next day was unfortunate, as my teammate got caught up with real life stuff, so I was left on my own for about half the day. He made up for it though with hard work and good stuff. We made excellent progress this day, however, getting the inventory and puzzle flow working nicely and completing our first puzzle, the safe. There was some tension though, as we had disagreements on the best way to code something, which, I suppose, comes with the panic and stress of making a game in a short time.

Progress after day 2

Day three (Cutting it close)

So the last day, we tried our hardest to make everything work right, complete any of the unfinished puzzles and add the finishing touches, such as UI art, sounds and menus. It was tense, as both Google Drive caused problems and the LDJam site going kaput. We eventually submitted our game about 1 hour 30 mins before the deadline.

Finished

In the end both of us were really happy with the finished project, and our friendship remains intact, happy days. We learnt a lot from this experience, and hope to continue working on the game and make it into a full experience. A few of the puzzles were cut from the final release, as we just ran out of time to add them. What did we learn from this? Mainly this:

USE PROPER SOURCE CONTROL

Google Drive was a nightmare to use, it kept syncing different versions of our game, and overwriting some but not all the work at varying intervals. We ended up splitting the work into 2 separate projects, but even that brought issues when adding one persons work to another project.

Second thing we learnt is maybe spend a bit more time designing the code structure. I am mostly to blame for all the hard coded scripts in the game, just to get everything calling each other within the time frame. I can't wait to get back into the code and refactor it all into neat functions and scripts.

Working with @joshua-sellers really helped this dare though, as it kept my motivation and focus and made the whole experience fun. I gave an earlier LD ago before, but I gave up after the first day cos it wasn't fun and was just stressful alone. Kudos to all Compo entries and solo Jamists for your dedication. Maybe i'll do Compo eventually, but Jams are fun with friends.

While I could ramble on for another 4535 or something characters, I shall end this here. I hope you'll check out our game, be kind, because we are two new programmers and this is our first time doing something like this.

Hope everyone had a good Ludum Dare!!!!

Also a question to those Ludum Dare Veterans, what are the rules concerning bug fixing after submission? The page on this website say its ok if the problem wasn't working correctly on upload, but there is a major bug in our game which could make it impossible to finish the game, which I only found today. I'm scared of updating the drive files and gamejolt now, with the bug fix, in case it disqualifies the game. Thoughts?

Had to fix a gamebreaking bug in our game, here is the full changelog:

Version 1.1

*Fixed a bug causing text on lamp object not to show.

*Fixed a gamebreaking bug where zooming out of the safe or vent after opening them prevented the object inside to be collected.

*Resized rug to be viewable in certain resolutions.

*Changed text of the last sentence in book, to make more sense.

I am unable to update Gamejolt WebGL version at the moment due to unity issues, so it is still Version 1.0 there. The download is updated however.

Check it out at https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/the-room

Bit late to judging, can't wait to check out some of these games. As judging has started, here is a shameless plug for our game 'The Room', a puzzle game where you have to solve puzzles and escape the room.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/the-room

It was made my me and @joshua-sellers and we're really happy with the result. I hope you'll swing by and give it a look. Good luck everybody and hope you enjoy.