Well, as long as I’m having my break I might as well post this. A screenshot of my progress so far for the jam. The game will be a strategy/action game played locally by 2 players on Android tablets (there will also be a PC version for testing purposes and an AI mode if I have time). Each player controls the position and rotation of different types of platforms in their side of the field. The platforms so far are

• Machine gun: shoots bullets at regular intervals
• Shield: blocks incoming damage

The objective is to manage your side to overpower the enemy side (I’m planning on adding mineable resources with which you can build new platforms and a base that you have to destroy later on).

If you want more updates on this project follow me on twitter or follow my Twitch stream, which will be up soon.

Have a nice jam everyone!

I’m pretty tired now, so I’m going to call it a day, but first, an update on what happened today. Maybe someone will find it useful, if not it is still a great way to organize myself 😛

The game (no name yet) is a local multiplayer RTS/action for tablets. You can control gun platforms on your side of the screen and your objective is to destroy the commander of the enemy.

• The commander is the unit with the star. It can mine the nearby asteroid (green) to get resources which can be used to buy more platforms (not implemented yet). The asteroid will move around your field so you’ll have to decide if it’s worth risking the commander to mine it.
• The machine gun shoots bullets at regular intervals. Has the potential to spam the enemy side
• The shield blocks incoming attacks (will reflect them in the future, and will be disabled after a hit)
• The missle launcher shoots missles that only go forward but follow the platform that shot it on the Y axis. You can micro these as guided shots that penetrate the enemy defense in tight points.
• The mortar launcher lobs a bomb that will always hit the target and cause area damage, but is very slow to fire and travel and the platform is very vulnerable

If you want more updates on the project follow me on Twitter and Twitch

So my plans for coming days are as follows:

Sunday:

• Implement the building of new units
• Better controls on both tablet and PC
• Better visual feedback (especially when a platform is about to shoot)
• Victory conditions and menu

Monday:

• Polish
• Basic AI
• Testing and balancing with real people

Extra work that I probably won’t have time to do:

• Implement 2 new platforms: one that slows down stuff in an area in the enemy side of the field, and a shotgun

Have a good jam everyone! 😀

Small update on my strategy game. Most of the stuff seems to be working except for the building of new units. Will try to do that tonight so I can just do polish and maybe an AI tomorrow.

Today was pretty brutal, but I managed to implement most of the stuff I had planned.

The gun platforms are working decently now, you can buy new ones, and the game finishes and can be restarted. I’ve also submitted the game to the Play store so it can hopefully be approved by tomorrow. The game page is also prepped and ready.

There’s still lots of work to do. I’ve changed my mind about the AI. I will not try to implement it tomorrow as it would be impossible to finish. Instead, I will implement a hotseat mode, where you can take turns with someone so you can play on your PC or maybe alone just so you can get a taste of the game. Here’s my trello board of the stuff I’ll try to do next. This is the second time I’m using trello to organize a project as I hate the clunky issue tracker on Bitbucket and I have no more repositories left on GitHub. But I have to say trello is not that bad. The biggest disadvantage is you can’t cross-reference issues with commits, but working through the back history of a repo is not something I do often in a jam anyways, so it’s a good tool that I recommend.

It lives! I may not have slept this night, but sleep is overrated anyway. I’m rather pleased with how the game turned out. I spent today polishing the game, solving bugs and actually balancing the units. The only big part that I wanted to finish but couldn’t was the AI, but in retrospect that was a monstrous task anyway. Good thing I had a backup plan. I introduce you to the hotseat mode:

So taking turns is my idea of letting you play on your computer with a friend, alone, or on a small device, if you don’t happen to have an Android tablet and a friend that likes strategy games lying around. The AI I would have done in a jam would have been rudimentary anyway, so maybe giving you a chance to play against yourself taking ‘turns’ was a better idea anyway.

So, apart from a few bugs that I didn’t quite manage to squish (nothing game breaking hopefully) the game works quite nicely, and I actually had fun testing it this morning with a friend.

If this looks even remotely interesting to you, please give it a try on my entry page. I will be continuing this game in the future so any feedback you can give is more than welcome!

I’ll be publishing a Post Mortem these days with a few things I’ve learned from this jam, but now is the time for REST! Happy submission everyone!

First of all, Merry Christmas to everyone! I hope you’re having a great vacation!

Now, back to business… As promised, here’s the Post Mortem for the small prototype I did for this Ludum Dare. It’s called Operation Barrage and you can download and rate it at this link. It’s an RTS/Action game for 2 people playing on the same tablet device. The prototype features an Android version and also a Windows/Web version. Here is me playing against my alter ego, taking turns.

If you like this project stay tuned for more news. I have been working and continue to work on a post jam version and you will be seeing more updates soon.

The good

• The concept: I find this concept really entertaining. This is actually a game I would like to play on my tablet, but have not been able to find it. So, not only I had a blast developing it, but I also enjoy playing it. Now this might seem obvious, but having fun playing it after 8 hours of working on it really helps with motivation.
• Achievable, scalable design: After overshooting the goals in my last LD jam, this time I wanted to start simple. A concept that is fun to play even without tons of content, but that can be easily expanded upon. I think this time around I have achieved that goal.
• Although balancing is secondary in a prototype, I actually got a chance to tweak unit costs, abilities and parameters both during the jam and immediately afterwards. It’s a great way to evolve the concept into something that people want to play based on the feedback loop right from the start.

The bad

• Unclear tutorial: I consider this my Achilles’ heel, mostly due to the lack of time and feedback during a jam. A one screen visual tutorial wasn’t feasible here since there is a bit of content to explain. But still, a small explanation scenario for the controls and each unit would have been better than the rushed tutorial I did which was basically just a masked huge wall of text.
• Bad UI: Now that Unity 4.6 is here, there are no more excuses for crappy UIs, and I hope to get a good enough grasp on it to improve this area for next time. The UX was not designed ahead of time, and it shows. Elements are placed around randomly and it’s hard to find the information you need fast.
• Unclear game design: I based this game on the principles of Starcraft: tactics, strategy and economy, though on a much smaller scale and different design path for obvious reasons. Unfortunately I never quite understood if I wanted it to be a slow game of strategic thinking, or a faster, micro and action focused RTS like Starcraft. This is something I still don’t quite know, but hope it will flesh itself out as development continues.
• Little polish in visual design: I’m no artist, but I can definetly do better than circles and stars. Unfortunately, I didn’t have time to polish the visual aspect like graphics and particle effects.

The ugly

• Bad controls: being a touch focused game I spent most of the time testing that. Unfortunately, due to my lack of experience in this area, the controls never quite felt good on an actual device. With 2 people furiously tapping on a low end Android tablet that doesn’t register touches well at times, doing the action you want becomes an exercise in frustration. Mouse controls were slapped on fast and weren’t very intuitive or fast.
• No AI: Even though the game was very visible, and got lots of votes, not many people offered feedback. I imagine this to be due to the fact that playing it is a chore compared to other entries. You need to install and APK on your Android tablet, find a friend, understand the rules and explain them to him or her as well. An AI and a decent desktop version would have alleviated this problem greatly, but unfortunately was unfeasible, due to the lack of time and my lack of experience in AI programming (is it even possible to do sensible AI for an RTS in a jam?). I hoped to work around this issue by adding a new play mode: hotseat. Taking turns was my idea of someone playing against himself or against another player on a desktop, but since it was done very fast, it wasn’t calibrated well, and the turns were WAAY too fast.

So, like I said, I had lots of fun with this LD entry, and even though it has lots of flaws, I think I know how to address them and bring out the potential of the concept. That means I will still be working on it until I’m happy with the results. If you want to follow the development or get access to the latest test builds on Google Play (which include a test mode with 3d graphics, and lots of fixes and improvements) message me or follow me on Twitter.

Happy holidays people!

Leaving this idea out there if somebody wants to use it. It seemed interesting to me, but I will be going for a different route.

You're exploring a new city but you have to take a selfie every 10 seconds or your Instagram followers will be lost. Either top down visuals but would need to think of something interesting to do while exploring. Or first person maybe gives a better sense of exploration. Moving through the world, finding items to include in selfie with you will increase points. Like different kinds of foods, monuments etc. Can lead to funny situations like stopping in the middle of street to take a selfie and getting hit by a car. You should be able to select some posture and facial expression and see the actual selfie, maybe a collection at the end of the game.

I'm working on a game where a clock hand does a full rotation every 10 seconds and when it touches enemies it makes them attack. You can't kill enemies directly, but you have to move them around to make them kill each other.

Calling it a day for now. I managed to get a basic gameplay loop with one enemy type.

Tomorrow I will be adding some more enemy types and interactions and polish the graphics.

Has anyone managed to get a Godot web export to work on the LD page? I have uploaded the same zip that I uploaded to itch.io and here I get the following error, while on itch it is working correctly.

Entry page

Just submitted my jam entry. I had a lot of fun making this and strangely enough had time to play and polish it, and I'm pretty happy with the result.

I changed the free assets with some simple vector graphics that I made. While not impressive, I like that at least the style is more consistent. This is the version at the end of day 1 for comparison:

I decided on a theme at the last possible moment and was thinking something like trying to protect these extractors that are warping in an alternate dimension to harvest the power of time, while some time guardians are trying to prevent that from happening.

I was thinking of adding multiple enemies or powerups in the beginning, but I ended up skipping that in favor of adding more polish. No doubt adding more would have resulted in a more buggy experience.

I enjoyed working with Godot, I love how signals and Nodes work compared to Unity, but I did have a lot of trouble with rotating rigidbodies that in Unity would be pretty easy to solve.